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Cruel intentions

Threat advisory: High - High risk of entertaining activities

Movie propaganda

What you can't have, you can't resist.

Cruel intentions is a wicked, diabolical romance of possession and power, and a romantic clash between innocence and decadence. Kathryn Merteuil (Sarah Michelle Gellar) and Sebastian Valmont (Ryan Phillippe) are incredibly wealthy and extremely bored upper crust Manhattan teenagers. Sebastian is a web-spinning strategist, who seduces women for sheer sport. His calculating female counterpart, Kathryn, swoops down like a vulture upon the innocent and naïve, and the two calculate their conquests like chess moves. They have everything they've ever wanted materially and share a love/hate relationship as stepbrother and stepsister. They love to taunt each other, constantly playing a game of one-upmanship out of boredom. This time, the pawns are Cecile Caldwell (Selma Blair) and Annette Hargrove (Reese Witherspoon).

It's summer break and Kathryn has been dumped by her Beau, Court Reynolds, for the innocent virgin Cecile. Desperate to get even, Kathryn challenges Sebastian to ruin Cecile by deflowering her and turning her into a tramp; thus humiliating Court by delivering Cecile to him as damaged goods. Sebastian has pretty much had all of the girls in New York city up to this point and he's gotten a bit bored of it all. This is too easy a conquest for him, though he does oblige.

He sets his sights on a greater challenge: the new headmaster's daughter, Annette, who recently wrote an article in Seventeen magazine about how she intends to stay pure until she marries her boyfriend. Sebastian bets Kathryn that he can seduce the chaste and pristine Annette before school begins in the autumn. Kathryn thinks this impossible because Annette is so virtuous and quickly agrees to the wager. The stakes: if Sebastian succeeds, Kathryn must give him a night of unbridled biblical pleasure, something he's wanted since their parents got married. If he fails, he must forfeit his priceless 1956 Jaguar to Kathryn and suffer the shame of defeat.

Based on Les liaisons dangereuses by Pierre Laclos. Directed and written by Roger Kumble. Also starring Joshua Jackson as Blaine Tuttle, Sean Patrick Thomas as Ronald Clifford, with appearances by Christine Baranski as Ms Caldwell, Swoosie Kurtz as Doctor Greenbaum, Louise Fletcher as Aunt Helen and Eric Mabius as Greg McConnell.

Intelligence analyst

Special Agent Matti

Theatrical report

Dangerous liaisons for the 90s, which is to say, pacier, sexier, darker.

The original (actually, there have been three previous films made of the book - Roger Vadim's 1959 French version; Stephen Frears' 1980s version with John Malkovich and Glenn Close; Milos Forman's 1988 version, Valmont, with Colin Firth and Annette Bening - but the Frears is the one everyone thinks of) was a nasty, sexually charged, vicious game for the jaded rich. Cruel intentions is targeted at a younger and less shockable audience, so the sex is more blatant and humourous, Ryan's bum gets screen time again and the games are more direct.

Of course, this directness wipes out a lot of the subtlety in the story, but we are talking about the attention deficit disorder generation here. The boldness of the direction is both refreshing and successful. It rages, it blitzes, it hammers, but there is also time for calm between the storms, time for a breath before plunging back into the maelstrom. I have now used my required amount of imagery for this review, so I can move on to the actors.

Ryan Phillippe first came to my attention in Homegrown, in which he played a bimbo mull grower. At the time I was struck by Ryan's physical beauty (that's some pair of buns!), the depth to which he submerged his identity into that of his character and the way he was able to make that two-dimensional identity grow beyond the script's limitations. In other words, he was damned good! The script for Cruel intentions is less flexible but Ryan still manages to find flexibility in Sebastian: he is heart breaker and heart broken. Sarah Michelle Gellar is delightfully damaged in a way that is both intense and believable. Her throwaway looks of distaste were a bit much after the tenth or eleventh time but she was still a good foil to Ryan. Everyone else was good, too. (How long do you want this review to be?)

While Dangerous liaisons will remain a classic film, Cruel intentions is a film for the here and now. The story and the characters are timeless, but the conception is not: it is too rooted in contemporaneity to withstand the test of time. That said, it is also the reason you should see it now, when you are most able to appreciate it.