[In the following review, Bowie asserts that although Valmont is visually stunning, the film is ultimately a sterile adaptation of Les Liaisons dangereuses.]

What will Milos Forman do next?, cinema-goers were entitled to ask themselves during the long years of silence that followed Amadeus. Forman's career had been Protean, after all, and the gulf between, say, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and the Shaffer adaptation was perhaps even more remarkable than the caesura that the Soviet tanks had inserted between his early Czech-language films and the later English series. The surprise with Valmont, based on Laclos's Les Liaisons dangereuses and now released in Britain after a delay of two years, is that there is no surprise: hard on the heels of one big-budget costume drama with a late eighteenth-century setting comes another of the same kind, sleekly photographed and awash with expensive local colour. Amadeus offered a prophetic glimpse of the commodified and designerized Mozart that the current bicentennial celebrations have brought into being, and one might have expected Forman himself to have put the lid back on his pomade-jar by now and returned his flounces and farthingales to the wardrobe. But no: even more than its predecessor, this is a film that seeks to gratify the concupiscent time-traveller's eye.

Les Liaisons dangereuses is not an obvious place to begin quarrying for a period screenplay of this kind, for Laclos's text in its original form is spectacularly unvisual. The novel is the fullest flowering of the epistolary tradition in European fiction; it is a cat's cradle of intersecting destinies held together by exquisite verbal artifice; it portrays human passion as endlessly subject to the mediations and indirections of language; and it is remorselessly ironic in its account of sexual conduct and motivation. To make matters even less promising, the book contains enough conspiracy and bed-chamber politicking to sustain a good half-dozen two-hour movies. In paring it all down to manageable proportions, Forman is well served by his screenwriter, Jean-Claude Carrière, whose long partnership with the later Buñuel was a perfect training in textual economy. Carrière not only avoids bel canto spoken dialogue but moves epistle-writing itself to the margins of the scene: dissimulation is still at the centre of the work, but it is now to be observed in pantomimic expression and gesture that need only sporadic support from the verbal arts.

In refashioning Laclos's plot, Forman and Carrière have opted for Cécile Volanges as the mainstay, where Stephen Frears and Christopher Hampton in their almost simultaneous film version favoured the Présidente de Tourvel. And Carrière's choice, which runs against the grain of the novel, has bizarre consequences. In Laclos, the relationship between Valmont and Merteuil is the central tale of rivalry and revenge upon which all other tales hang: youthful virgins, faithful wives, imperceptive bridegrooms and husbands are seduced or dishonoured in accordance with the developed and exacting libertine code to which Valmont and Merteuil both subscribe. The dominant idiom is that of the battlefield, and sexual pleasure is the product of long-term strategic calculation. In choosing to place Cécile rather than Tourvel at the crossroads of the film, its makers could have produced a strongly lit tableau of corrupted innocence and thereby remained loyal to a major dimension of this complex book. But their unusual choice of second heroine is part of a thoroughgoing attempt to re-imagine the book under the sign of Youth. Fifteen-year-old Cécile is engagingly played by Fairuza Balk, who was indeed, we are assured, fifteen at the time of filming. And Laclos's remaining principals are all in their twenties, Forman has discovered. Accordingly, Colin Firth as Valmont, Annette Bening as Merteuil and Meg Tilly as Tourvel all emerge as fresh-faced experimentalists in matters of the heart. They still have growing up to do, and their several voyages of self-discovery really should be over by the age of thirty if indecency is to be avoided. “If the story of Les Liaisons happened to people of thirty or forty years of age,” Forman has said in a recent interview, “it would be very unpleasant.”

This conceit works well in that it keeps Laclos's teeming ironies under control and creates a consoling solidarity between predator and prey: the deflowering of Cécile is part of an educative process conducted by a rather glamorous teen-and-twenty self-help group. There are no real villains or victims on the scene, and even the cruellest rites of passage are something of a romp. This film removes the darkness and savagery from Laclos's book. Who could guess, contemplating the seductive surfaces and the design youthfulness of it all, that Laclos's Valmont had perverse and destructive designs upon his women? Or that hatred runs as a constant theme through the ingenious repartee of Valmont and Merteuil? Or that the battle between self and other is here routinely fought to the imagined death?

Valmont contains memorable passages of comic invention, and sumptuous displays of architecture; there is brilliant effrontery in its portrayal of costumed and uncostumed sex; and the ending of the film, much altered from the letter of Laclos's book, swings back to the spirit of it with complete conviction. But overall Forman's latest excursion into grand cinema is far too safe, and juvenile, and complaisantly ancien régime. “I saw the manners of my time and published these Letters,” Laclos wrote on his title-page, quoting La Nouvelle Héloïse and mocking Rousseau's benign vision of man and woman in society. But his novel also countered Rousseau's encouraging view of the human psyche. Far from being an account of youth in its slow progress towards adulthood, Les Liaisons dangereuses is a work that helps to make intelligible the grown-up follies of the Marquis de Sade, the Terror and our own murderous century. Forman's Valmont keeps quieter and kinder company.