Cruelty and the Beast

by Christopher Pearson

Bored with provincial life, a listless French aristocrat named Pierre Choderlos de Laclos published his first, last, and only prose work in 1782, the epistolary novel Les Liasons Dangeueruses. At its best, the novel is a thorough savaging of the callous sexual and social relationships of an insular group of Laclos' upper-crust contemporaries. Laclos's caustic portrayal of the French aristocracy, Charles Baudelaire would later exclaim, “burns like ice.”

Of the four modern film adaptations of the novel, Christopher Hubbard's Dangerous Liaisons (1988) is perhaps the most famous.

Cast alongside Michelle Pfeiffer and John Malkovich, Glenn Close received an Academy-Award nomination for her portrayal of the wicked sexual predator Marquise de Merteuil.

Near the opening of the film, Merteuil encapsulates her animating philosophy with the oft-quoted lines: “When I came out into society I was 15. I already knew then that the role I was condemned to, namely to keep quiet and do what I was told, gave me the perfect opportunity to listen and observe. Not to what people told me, which naturally was of no interest to me, but to whatever it was they were trying to hide. I practiced detachment. I learned how to look cheerful while under the table I stuck a fork onto the back of my hand. I became a virtuoso of deceit. I consulted the strictest moralists to learn how to appear, philosophers to find out what to think, and novelist to see what I could get away with, and in the end it all came down to one wonderfully simple principle: that happiness and vanity are incompatible.”

The most recent adaptation, of course, is Cruel Intentions. Released on March 5 and a minor hit with a gross of some $65 million, the film takes a different tack on the novel entirely. First-time director Roger Kumble, the screenwriter for Kingpin and National Lampoon's Senior Trip, gamely attempts to put a contemporary sheen on the proceedings.

He has replaced Laclos' roster of randy eighteenth century French aristocrats with equally lustful Manhattan prep schoolers of the 1990's.

Though no less calculating or craven, Kumble's Kathryn Merteuil (Sarah Michelle Gellar) now pouts, “But I want to f*ck” when she is spurned by her step-brother and stores cocaine in the silver cross that hangs around her neck.

With their bickering parents on an overseas vacation, Kathryn lives with her step-brother Sebastian Valmont (Ryan Philippe) in a posh Manhattan high-rise.

As the film opens, Kathryn is plotting revenge, embittered against her blue-blooded ex-boyfriend for his choice of a 14 year-old high school freshman, Cecile Caldwell, as her replacement. Hoping to humiliate her ex, she implores Sebastian to seduce the young Cecile.

Sebastian, however, has tired of tomcatting around with insipid debutantes and is desperately in pursuit of a challenge. He finds it in the form of one Annette Hargrove (Reese Witherspoon), a corn-fed virgin from the Midwest who has just published a manifesto in Seventeen magazine forswearing sex until marriage.

Upon hearing that the girl is, in fact, the daughter of his prep school's new incoming headmaster, Sebastian sees her as just ripe for the plucking. Doubtful of that prospect, Kathryn wagers Sebastian that Annette Hargrove is a fortress of chastity even he can't breach.

If he fails to bed the girl, Kathryn receives Sebastian's 1956 Jaguar roadster. If he does, he gets Kathryn; two notches on his bedpost for but one seduction.

Though bonded to Kathryn through marriage if not by blood, Sebastian agrees to the bet, wanting nothing more than a good romp in the sheets with his stepsister.

As his previous farcical comedies have made clear, Kumble dislikes subtlety. In his latest film, he strips Laclos' novel of its moral ambiguities and reduces the story to one of simple comeuppance befalling morally vacuous teenagers.

This rendering of the novel is probably close to the novel's original intent. (One of Laclos' other works was an instructional manual for young women on the practice of feminine virtue.) Yet the movie's threadbare plot structure collapses when it reaches the central twist in both the film as well as Laclos' novel, Valmont's love for the woman he intended to seduce and discard.

When Kumble's Sebastian suddenly deems Annette worthy of more than a simple debasement, it's expected but, in the broader context of the film, seems contrived.

If Cruel Intentions fails as a convincing work of art, it somehow succeeds, however, in creating a drama that quite enjoyably pits self-righteous virtue against abject decadence, prissiness against debauchery, and, ultimately, self-absorption against everything else beyond one's personal confines.

Though Kathryn is the movie's real villain, none of the characters escape rebuke, even the hapless Cecile, a dim-witted pubescent who develops a sick sexual appetite that her seducer Sebastian refuses to tolerate.

Kumble's film also benefits from a terrific cast. The suitably gorgeous Sarah Michelle Gellar (Buffy the Vampire Slayer) is remarkably adept as Kathryn Merteuil. Some of her role's off-handed sexual references are slightly “mature” for the usual viewers of the Warner Brothers Network but, at the very least, there is nothing in Ms. Gellar's performance to disappoint the eye.

Mired in the past by bit parts and horrible leads (Studio 54), Ryan Philippe is much better than I would have expected and the script offers him quite a few good lines (“E-mail is only for geeks and pedophiles.”)

As Annette, Reese Witherspoon gives an otherwise sterile and bland character considerable life. Selma Blair is inept as Cecile and the cadence of her speech is frequently off-kilter. But neither failings of Blair or director Roger Kumble really matter in the end.

As Laclos himself predicted, “tales of lustful vengeance will always trump those of benign goodwill, no matter the skill of their respective creators.”