Les Liaisons dangereuses (1959)
Directed by Roger Vadim

Film Review

Pierre Choderlos de Laclos claimed that his main motivation for writing Les Liaisons dangereuses, the most scandalous novel of the 18th century, was 'to create some stir in the world and continue to do so after [he] had gone from it'. Director Roger Vadim might well have had the same objective in mind for his liberal adaptation of Laclos's inflammatory text, and his film certainly provoked a fair amount of controversy.  Having met with a barrage of criticism for its supposedly immoral tone, Vadim's contemporary take on Les Liaisons dangereuses was banned in several town in France and ended up with a 16 certificate.  Just as the condemnation of the high-minded moralists had helped to make Laclos's novel a society bestseller on its release in 1782, so the furore surrounding Vadim's film helped to make it a box office hit, with an audience of 4.3 million in France alone.  One body that objected most strongly to the film on its initial release was the writers' association Sociéte des gens de lettres de France, which insisted that its title be changed to Les Liaisons dangereuses 1960 as they felt it strayed too far from Laclos's novel and therefore could not legitimately bear its title.

At the time, Vadim was no stranger to controversy.  His first film, Et Dieu... créa la femme (1956), had been attacked for its overt eroticism and portrayal of women as objects of male desire.  Vadim revelled in such criticism; he saw himself as an agent provocateur, on a mission to expose the failings of an increasingly decadent bourgeois society, but many saw him as a shameless self-publicist who was as morally deficient as those he sought to pillory in his films.   By time-shifting Laclos's novel from the 1760s to the 1950s, Vadim was able to deliver the most damning assault on a stratum of French society that had much in common with the profligate nobility of pre-revolutionary France.  That the film provoked such a hostile reaction could be taken as a sign that it was not too far from the truth.

In Vadim's film, Laclos's satanic anti-heroes, the Marquise de Merteuil and Vicomte de Valmont, are reincarnated as a pair of depraved socialites, played to perfection by two of French cinema's most iconic actors, Jeanne Moreau and Gérard Philipe.  Moreau was just a few years away from becoming a darling of the French New Wave, though her breakthrough role in François Truffaut's Jules et Jim (1962).  Tragically, Philipe would be dead within three months of the film's release, carried off by an untreatable cancer at the age of 36 - this was his penultimate film appearance.  One of the great strengths of Vadim's Les Liaisons dangereuses is that, whilst Moreau and Philipe never allow us to forget the sickening villainy of their characters, we cannot help succumbing to their charms.  As in the novel, Merteuil and Valmont fill us with revulsion, but they also fascinate us, and in the end we are even compelled to feel sympathy for them.  They are not so much monsters as pitiful souls living in a moral vacuum, representatives of a thoroughly rotten society that is contemptuous of virtue and addicted to the most shallow of pleasures.
 
Marianne Tourvel and Cécile Volanges (played respectively by Vadim's future wife Annette Stroyberg and Jeanne Valérie) personify those qualities of womanhood that Vadim himself greatly admired, an admirable challenge for the scheming Merteuil and Valmont.  All of Vadim's films are, to a greater or lesser extent, an intimate study in the female psyche, and it is the contrast between Marianne and Cécile which seems to be the director's main concern.  Whilst Marianne represents some kind of romantic ideal, the incorruptible acme of feminine virtue, Cécile is a moral pragmatist who always seeks simple solutions to difficult problems.  Cécile submits to Valmont as this is the easiest way to prevent him from ruining her future plans of marital happiness.  By contrast, Valmont's seduction of Marianne is achieved not by cunning but by the special alchemy of love.  The purity of Valmont's feelings for Marianne could not be further from the perverse nature of his relationship with his wife Merteuil, who regards love as a trap that must be avoided at all costs.  The irony, of course, is that Merteuil has herself become snared, through her fondest feelings for Valmont, and this is what ultimately destroys her.

The fifth crucial protagonist in this hideously tangled web of intrigue is Cécile's reluctant fiancé, Danceny, a seemingly harmless geek who turns out to be the most dangerous of adversaries (being a mathematician, he could have bored Valmont to death with a treatise on differential calculus if he had been so inclined).  The part of Danceny allowed Jean-Louis Trintignant to resume his acting career after his military service, having almost walked away from the profession after falling foul of the paparazzi during the making of Dieu... créa la femme.  Another face to watch out for is the avant-garde writer Boris Vian, who puts in a rare film appearance, shortly before his death in June 1959.

An essential ingredient of the film is its highly innovative jazz soundtrack, most of which was supplied by the legendary American jazz pianist and composer Thelonious Monk, with a few additional pieces by Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers.  Presumably influenced by Louis Malle's recent Ascenseur pour l'échafaud (1958), Vadim uses jazz to give his film a chic modernity that would set it apart from the stuffy one-size-fits-all melodramas that had come to dominate French cinema in the 1950s.  The film's use of jazz isn't a cheap marketing ploy - it really does complement the subject matter, giving the film a sweet aura of decadence, as enigmatic and strangely alluring as the central villains of the piece, Merteuil and Valmont.

In Vadim's famously uneven oeuvre there is no film that is as consistently well-constructed and elegant as Les Liaisons dangereuses.  At a time when colour was beginning to overtake monochrome in France, Vadim shows just how beautiful and evocative a black-and-white film can be, and does so in almost every one of his carefully composed shots.  Vadim's tendency to over-egg the pudding is apparent in a few sequences where exaggerated zooms and voyeuristic camera movement are used a little too self-consciously.  The chess motif that is established in the opening credits sequence is used effectively throughout the film to remind us that everything we see on screen is a game meticulously engineered by two calculating intellects, not the diabolical duo Merteuil and Valmont, but Vadim and his co-screenwriter Roger Vailland.

Stephen Frears' lavish period piece Dangerous Liaisons (1988) may be a more faithful rendition of Laclos's literary masterpiece but Vadim's version has just as much going for it - strong performances from a charismatic cast, a mise-en-scène that is effortlessly stylish, a compelling narrative and (best of all) a jazz score to die for.  Transposing Laclos's story of 18th century intrigue to the 1950s was a stroke of genius on Vadim's part and reveals what is perhaps most shocking about Les Liaisons dangereuses - its inherent timelessness.  Every age, it seems, will have its Marquise de Merteuil and Vicomte de Valmont...

Film Synopsis

In modern day France, Juliette de Merteuil is a well-regarded society belle who is happily married to the Vicomte de Valmont, a distinguished diplomat.  Whilst keeping up a pretence of bourgeois respectability, Juliette and her husband indulge in cruel games of seduction for their own amusement.  When she learns that a lover of hers has thrown her over so he can marry Cécile Volanges, Juliette de Merteuil is incensed and plans to have her revenge.  She coaxes Valmont into seducing the innocent young woman before her wedding day.  In truth, it is not Juliette's society beau that Cécile loves but Danceny, an impoverished mathematics student.  Danceny's insistence that he is not yet ready to marry Cécile makes her an easy prey for Valmont.  But whilst he is undertaking this mission, Valmont falls under the spell of another woman, Marianne Tourvel.  Marianne's fidelity to her husband provides Valmont with a rare challenge, but in the end he succeeds in getting her to break her marital vows.  When Juliette hears of this hard-won victory she deduces, correctly, that Valmont has fallen in love with Marianne and makes up her mind to drive them apart, at whatever cost...