TV REVIEW | ’DANGEROUS LIAISONS’

Catty, Cruel and French, Très French

By VIRGINIA HEFFERNAN

Published: March 15, 2004

The new new new "Dangerous Liaisons" - not the one starring Glenn Close ("Dangerous Liaisons," 1988), Annette Bening ("Valmont," 1989) or Sarah Michelle Gellar ("Cruel Intentions," 1999), but the television mini-series with Catherine Deneuve tonight on WE - affords many pleasures of a French kind.

This is irony, is it not, to style Rupert Everett, a gay man about town, as a French womanizer? And sultry Nastassja Kinski, fixed up like a desperate Match.com portrait, playing chaste? And Ms. Deneuve, softened by age and oversweet makeup, looking uncannily like a surgeon’s confection and not the real thing we know her to be? Dressed by Jean Paul Gaultier, more Atlantic City than Parisian court, Ms. Deneuve still runs this show. Quel quel everything.

Let’s face it, Europhiles: this is exciting, having the 18th-century pulp story of sexual auteurism and high-end cattiness right on WE, the Women’s Entertainment network. Sure, this American network tries to recast the players as homegrown archetypes in its promotional materials - Valmont is "pathological" and the infinitely evil Mme. de Merteuil "strong" and "tough," a WE exemplar - but we know better.

For in the end Valmont will not seek therapy, and Mme. de Merteuil will not be valiant. In this way they are irresistible, and this movie brings across the selfish joy - it seems right to say jouissance, but I’ll keep my head - of Choderlos de Laclos’s cross/double-cross plot. Both will contrive to ruin the lives of almost everyone, beginning with a man who jilted Mme. de Merteuil and ending with each other.

Shot in France, with heart-pounding horseback scenes in the green countryside, this "Dangerous Liaisons" may be the most beautiful yet. (The cars - dark and awesome conveyances of the 1960’s, when this adaptation is set - even top the great-looking Jaguar roadster that Ryan Phillippe drove in "Cruel Intentions.")

Mr. Everett is good as Valmont, if slightly unsure of how much melodrama he’s got the stomach for. (No one will ever hiss with such stupefying relish as John Malkovich did in the 1988 version.) Leelee Sobieski, as the baby harp seal Cecile, is talented. More than perhaps any other American actress, she actually looks as if she might have gone to finishing school in Switzerland, as she is supposed to have done in this film. Though smothered in buttery-chunk hair and Mary Quant-style clothes, Ms. Kinski still manages to convey her sexiness with her pan-European voice. The performances, in general, might have added up to more if not for the movie’s rampant dubbing. "Dangerous Liaisons" was originally made in French, and no doubt it loses something in translation, especially the performance of Ms. Deneuve, who acts mostly with small inflections.

But the quality that is lost - the Frenchness of the story, say - is more valuable for being lost. Without the detail that would make sense of the callousness of Valmont and Mme. de Merteuil onscreen, American viewers can imagine that whatever impels them is enormous, all-explaining, bigger than Europe itself. It is the thing that makes them so imperious, so inclined to scoff at innocence and love, and so gifted at finding pleasure in bad behavior. Would that we, who watch "Dangerous Liaisons" in any version we can, but must endure moralism in the rest of our television movies, could get ourselves some of that.

DANGEROUS LIAISONS

WE, Tonight and tomorrow night at 8, Eastern time; 5, Pacific time; 7, Central time.

Directed by Josée Dayan; Jean-Luc Azoulay, producer; Jeff Eisenberg, executive in charge of production for WE: Women’s Entertainment.

WITH: Catherine Deneuve (Mme. de Merteuil), Rupert Everett (Valmont), Leelee Sobieski (Cecile), Nastassja Kinski (Marie Tourvel) and Andrzej Zulawski (Gercourt).