Valmont

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Alec B Its interesting as a slower and colder adaptation than the more famous "Dangerous Liaisons". It isn't nearly as memorable (the cruelties are less overtly vicious and screenplay is less cutting) which is why it hasn't lingered in our cultural imagination but its still effectively captures the emotional warfare of the idle rich. Rated 3.5/5 Stars •  Rated 3.5 out of 5 stars 01/11/25 Full Review Steve D This sort of thing has been done to death. Rated 2/5 Stars •  Rated 2 out of 5 stars 02/27/23 Full Review Audience Member Though pales in comparison with Stephen Frears' Oscars darling Dangerous Liaisons from the previous year, Milos Forman's interpretation of Pierre Choderlos de Laclos' 1782 French epistolary novel Les Liaisons dangereuses luminesces with Annette Bening's exquisite acting craft and diabolical sexual chicanery of the source. Rated 4/5 Stars •  Rated 4 out of 5 stars 01/22/23 Full Review Audience Member Speaking to Ebert around the time of its release, Milos Forman relayed a conversation the director had with his screenwriter, where the latter pointed out that "there is not one thing we have so far in the script that's in the book." Taking the Frears adaptation the year prior as more genuinely adherent to the text, what makes this iteration so much more relevant, alive, and modern---even as it dons the aesthetic style of a conventional period piece, with its slow pacing and austere long shots---is precisely the sense of continuity the film implies between the class system of 1780s and that of the 1980s (a point that only anachronistically can be afforded the French text). If the Frears version ultimately echoes the morality tale melodrama of the original novel, a story where the debauched in the end get their just desserts, then Forman's film shifts the emphasis instead to the political structures underlying social mores, a narrative not about the corruption of the innocent or the redemption of the dissolute, but something closer to a Bildungsroman where the young are instructed in the materialism and wantonness of the world, made to give up romantic idealism for social careerism. Though the pace is slower, the narrative more unwieldy, the characters a bit blurrier, and the lead performances less seductively captivating---albeit with far better turns by the supporting cast, echoing the different focus---VALMONT is the crueler film precisely because it is the colder one, less forgivably modern and so more monstrous in its unflinching presentation of class hierarchy. Rated 4/5 Stars •  Rated 4 out of 5 stars 01/30/23 Full Review Audience Member Like Jack Clayton's The Great Gatsby, it should be ripped from its literary routes and therefore treated as seperate material. As a film, Milos Forman's Valmont is suspenseful, rewarding, and thoroughly entertaining. Rated 3.5/5 Stars •  Rated 3.5 out of 5 stars 01/14/23 Full Review Audience Member This movie was sad and cruel. I was disgusted by the way two seemingly intelligent adults used children for their entertainment. Rated 2.5/5 Stars •  Rated 2.5 out of 5 stars 02/14/23 Full Review Read all reviews

Valmont

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