Movie of the Day
Today’s movie is Dangerous Liaisons 1988 Movie . I find it is a great movie with awesome acting ,fantastic costumes , hair and jewellery, set design.
Storyline
In 18th century France, the Marquise de Merteuil and the Vicomte de Valmont play a dangerous game of seduction. Valmont is someone who measures success by the number of his conquests and Merteuil challenges him to seduce the soon to be married Cecile de Volanges and provide proof in writing of his success. His reward for doing so will be to spend the night with Merteuil. He has little difficulty seducing Cecile but what he really wants is to seduce Madame de Tourvel. When Merteuil learns that he has actually fallen in love with her, she refuses to let him claim his reward for seducing Cecile. Death soon follows.
Like the elaborate dresses into which she has been fitted with a good deal of help, the Marquise de Merteuil (Glenn Close) seems always about to burst, not because of any engineering failure but in anticipation of some delightful new viciousness, a plot of such subtlety that only she can appreciate it. She keeps control of herself and simply smiles.
In the fashion of the day, the Marquise’s waist is cinched to the point where her generous bust has no place to go but up, and possibly out. It can’t be comfortable but, among other things, the Marquise has learned that to be a successful woman in France in the 1780’s, the last decade of the ancien regime, one has to put up with a certain amount of pain. The pleasure will follow.
Pleasure also follows a certain amount of time spent becoming accustomed to the stylized mannerisms of ”Dangerous Liaisons,” Stephen Frears’s handsome, intelligent adaptation of Christopher Hampton’s London and Broadway play, ”Les Liaisons Dangereuses.”
At the center of the film are the Marquise de Merteuil and Vicomte de Valmont (John Malkovich), her rich, aristocratic former lover, who now devote themselves to the pursuit of sexual liaisons, not necessarily for pleasure but for the power they confer on the one who is loved but does not love. Power is all. It’s apparent in the film’s opening sequence that, since Valmont still has a passion for the Marquise, she holds the advantage.
The Marquise has a plan: to even the score with a lover who has left her, she asks Valmont to seduce the man’s virginal, convent-bred fiancee. Valmont has his own plan. He has set his sights on a faithful young wife whose husband is serving abroad. Valmont’s idea of pleasure is to persuade the wife to surrender herself to him without, for a moment, abandoning her principles.
When seduction has become such a commonplace pastime, refinements in betrayal are immensely important.
The Marquise insists that Valmont undertake her mission and, to keep him interested, agrees to spend one night with him if he can prove that he has also been successful with the faithful wife. Valmont accepts, but he makes a fatal mistake. He falls in love along the way.
