. Instead Harriet Warner has wittily crafted a tricksy new labyrinth for Laclos's characters to navigate. Except Valmont and Madame de Merteuil, the yin and yang of dastardly cunning, aren't quite Laclos's, having new first names and new circumstances. Valmont (Nicholas Denton) is a penniless pup who seduces older women and keeps their billets doux as collateral for blackmail. One victim is the unhappily married Merteuil (Lesley Manville, giving it the full tragic grande dame). But Valmont's true love is Camille (Alice Englert), a destitute sex worker who is instructed by Merteuil to 'avenge our sex'. Though she's not in Laclos's novel, this pell-mell assault on the patriarchy is really her story. One ticklish niggle is that Camille turns out to be such a feral manipulator that it's not always easy to root for her. No expense has been spared to recreate the beau monde of 1780s Paris. The Czech locations, lashings of Mozart and a jolly rock video aesthetic ramp up the fun. Throw in haughty lords, hot-to-trot mesdames and pert sans-culottes, plus the devoutly pure Jacqueline de Montrachet (Carice van Houten), and you've got a whole chessbo){kind=link}
This bawdy adaptation of Laclos’s classic novel plays fast and loose with the source material
It’s one thing to adapt a literary classic. It’s an altogether more hubristic gamble to extend a book’s afterlife beyond the bounds of the original. One thinks of the further adventures of Mr Micawber as imagined for ITV in 2001 by Only Fools and Horses creator John Sullivan. Nice idea, but there’s no competing with Dickens.
Les Liaisons dangereuses feels like a safer bet. The Laclos novel, telling of seduction and chicanery in letter form, is set in the codified milieu of pre-revolutionary Paris, but holds a mirror up to any society given to decadence and cancelling. Ours, say. Why not, therefore, take its principals and rustle up more misadventures for them?
Christopher Hampton, who dramatised the epistolary novel back in 1985, was first slated to take the job on but is now executive producer of Dangerous Liaisons (Lionsgate+). Instead Harriet Warner has wittily crafted a tricksy new labyrinth for Laclos’s characters to navigate.
Except Valmont and Madame de Merteuil, the yin and yang of dastardly cunning, aren’t quite Laclos’s, having new first names and new circumstances. Valmont (Nicholas Denton) is a penniless pup who seduces older women and keeps their billets doux as collateral for blackmail. One victim is the unhappily married Merteuil (Lesley Manville, giving it the full tragic grande dame).