Dangerous liaisons broadway janet mcteer

#Dangerous liaisons broadway janet mcteer movie#

( AprГЁs Г§a, of course, le deluge.) The great British actress Janet McTeer is playing Merteuil here, and she's fun to watch, steely, crafty, and occasionally, briefly, vulnerable.

The play, by Christopher Hampton, who also wrote the movie's screenplay, is about the sexual manipulations and schemes of these two bored Parisian libertines, a way for them to find something to entertain themselves in their stifling, stifled world. Despite the prodigious acting talent on stage, you never actually care about their characters. And so, too, is the rest of the play distant: Stagey and self-consciously acted, never rich and emotionally resonant. It's a distancing device, we're consciously moved from the present into the past. As theatergoers enter, the stately but decrepit drawing room on stage is conspicuously lighted by modern, industrial fluorescents as the play begins, those electric lights retract and chandeliers of flickering candles appear.

#Dangerous liaisons broadway janet mcteer movie#

The sequence-closeups of creams applied, powder sprayed, dГ©colletage arranged, ennui displayed-quickly establishes that everything, for these people, is about artifice and display and decadence, and also, not incidentally, that the film will have a sense of humor about this.ДЄ revival of Les Liaisons Dangereuses, the play from which the movie was adapted, opened on Broadway last night at the Booth Theatre, and it betrays no similarly light touch. The 1988 movie Dangerous Liaisons opens with an extended sequence that sets the tone for what follows: We watch two ancien-rГ©gime aristocrats, the Marquise de Merteuil and the Vicomte de Valmont (played by Glenn Close and John Malkovich, memorably), awake and dress, primped and pampered by sprawling retinues of liveried servants.