Lust Is a Thing with Feathers

By RICHARD CORLISS

DANGEROUS LIAISONS Directed by Stephen Frears

Screenplay by Christopher Hampton

The old moguls hated movies where people wore powdered wigs and wrote with feathers. So this film's first images should set the old bosses spinning in their mausoleums. A gentleman's peruke is affixed, a lady's bosom powdered. But this gentleman, the Vicomte de Valmont (John Malkovich), is an icy defiler, and this lady, the Marquise de Merteuil (Glenn Close), secretes contempt under her frozen smile. Among the French aristocracy just before the Revolution, she is the stage manager of affections and deceptions, he the lickerish snake who literally hisses at his adversaries. Their cruel games will lead them to peek through keyholes, swipe bedroom keys, purloin letters, ruin lives. And write with feathers.

Such a lovely couple, these two provocateurs of passion. Her salon is a school in which girls may unlearn their innocence. And he is the ideal professor for a young lady's sentimental education. Just now Valmont has two pupils in mind: a naive, eager teenager (Uma Thurman) and the beautiful, pious Mme. de Tourvel (Michelle Pfeiffer), who keeps resisting Valmont's purring declarations of love. And then, to his astonishment, he realizes that he means them. In a rake, sincerity is lethal. He who has lived by the word will die by the sword. And Mme. la Marquise will founder with him. Their game is over.

Onstage, Les Liaisons Dangereuses, Christopher Hampton's adaptation of the Choderlos de Laclos novel, was elegant and epicene. Les Lay caught the novel's central conceit -- that sex is a wicked game, the rankest form of show business -- in a witty talkathon on Topic A. The movie goes one crucial step further, allowing the characters to shrug off their finery and display some redeeming prurient interest. The actresses are all wanly handsome: ornaments of an era close to exhaustion. Pfeiffer and Thurman make for luscious bookends in the library of lust. Close sits back and plays the puppeteer of a dozen destinies, until she realizes that the job comes with strings attached.

Everyone who watches the late show knows that the antique French spoke with Oxford accents. Here, though, the aristocrats speak breadbasket American, while the servants talk with an English or Irish lilt -- a subtle joke on the imperialism of American culture. If there is a pitfall in this strategy, it is that American actors are defter at explosions than at epigrams. They are not trained, as the English are, to coil themselves in hauteur. So at times Malkovich plays the evil dandy too diligently; on his brow you can almost see the fop sweat. Then gradually he learns to trust the intimacy of Frears' close-up camera style. The lizard eyes crease with desire; tiny curlicues of smirk rise from the corners of his mouth; the wispy voice locates the moral malaise at the heart of Valmont's debauchery. He embodies the cynical wisdom of this excellent film: life is one big performance art, and sex is a little death.