[In the following excerpt, O'Brien argues that Valmont is more sensitive to the underlying humanity of its characters than Stephen Frears' Dangerous Liaisons.]

First things first: Valmont is not a remake of Dangerous Liaisons. Generally, it tells the same story; tonally, it is a completely different, sometimes better, sometimes weaker film. Its source is not the Broadway play, but the original novel; on the other hand, the film's credits declare it is “loosely based” on Laclos's text. Its new flavor reflects the humanistic vision of the director, Milos Forman (twice a big winner at the Oscars with One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and Amadeus), who continues to persist in his faith that nothing human can be wholly vile.

Valmont takes Forman back to the age of Amadeus, pre-French revolutionary Europe; Mozart, conducted again by Neville Marriner, echoes gracefully in its Parisian salons. As in Liaisons, there are chateaux aplenty and a costume feast for the eyes. But Forman gets beneath the pretty surface by drawing in urban lowlife; he never sees through one prism only; one scene of a food-buying spree in an open-air market is an astonishingly fresh, vibrant vision of old-world customs. The film ends in a wedding attended by the king, with Forman hinting, for those who know history, at the fate of the beautiful people of this brittle ancien régime.

The major force in the film, as in Liaisons, is not the title character, an aristocratic rake, but his ally in seductions, the manipulative Marquise de Meurteuil, here a remarkable discovery. Forman loves to cast less well-known actors in major parts exactly for the freshness of their impact on the audience; for the Marquise, he relies on England's Annette Benning, who serves the purpose perfectly. Benning brings to the role different skills and glamour than Glenn Close did in Liaisons. Benning is a lithe, visual stunner; her gowns have the right light grace of the 1780s; in one elegant, authentic chinoiserie bathrobe she's at her glamorous best and moral worst. Benning doesn't rage as colorfully as Close, but is better at wit and mischief. In the early scenes, she is also shown enduring betrayal in love; her revenge plans against the world are given full motive. In line with Forman's attempt to humanize monsters (cf. Salieri), his monsters are always first shown to be human.

Forman also uses minor actors wonderfully. Jeffrey Jones, using the same gift for personifying the stiff pomp of his emperor in Amadeus, is fine as the lover who betrays Benning; the elderly Fabia Drake (sometimes on Miss Marple) plays Valmont's elderly aunt and gives a lesson in crafty professionalism. At first almost senile, she comes on as a strong, shrewd observer, with a gem-like final gesture that seals Forman's claim that something good can even come of evil. Surprisingly, Valmont is a better, deeper version of “immediate family.” Forman won't bow to the god Irony.

Still, this is no masterpiece. Meg Tilly competently plays the innocent young married woman seduced by Valmont, but lacks the radiance of Michelle Pfeiffer in Liaisons. England's Colin Firth plays Valmont well, but the part is vaguely written. Forman tries to make Firth the movie's center, but forgets to give the character enough of one himself. From the beginning of Valmont, he is a rake searching for something better; in Liaisons, he only discovers values very late. As awkward as that was, the alternative isn't better: watching a character wrestle with equivocations is often tedious. Here you want to scream, “fish or cut bait.” The trick, which Forman misses, was to get Valmont to express conflict but without seeming like a paralyzed, Hamlet-like pre-Romantic.

Critics will constantly compare this film with Liaisons. Beware of any who overrate its faults, which are real, without an honest discussion of the ideological differences between the two movies. Ideology plays a heavy role in criticism, which expresses judgments but also often masks them. Forman will probably come in for some rough treatment because he has humanized, at times even sentimentalized, Laclos's novel. But this is only another way of saying his critics buy the cynical, ultra-ironic ideology which is the intellectual black hole of our age and which brightened the luster of Liaisons. Forman, having survived the mid-twentieth century in Eastern Europe, doesn't know the luxury of not giving a damn. One can only respect his blithe earnestness about caring.