I'm going to skip over the film that is next in line for my next Fave Friday film Scene, "Bob Roberts" in order to talk about my favorite scene in the number ten movie on my fave film list, Dangerous Liaisons. It is a film that I have been a rapt fan of since I first saw it years ago with a great friend of mine as a teenager and have just finished viewing again tonight.
There is not one frame, not one move, not one word in this film which has not been calculated to a most intelligent perfection. Everything about it is done masterfully, set design, shots, historical period costumes, music. It is a ballet of wickedness about two very very very bad people who play the most dangerous game of all.
Glenn Close as the Marquis deMarteuil and John Malkovich as Valmont are at the top of their game in every move they make. They meet each other as equals in every scene matching wit for wit and topping one another at every evil turn.
However it's watching Malkovich in this film that always gets to me. He does things so nuanced and clever, so insanely brilliant in this role that I believe them to be yet still unrealized. With a deadpan, near sickening nonchalance, he delivers a performance that engages you through subtly built up emotional layers to empathize with an absolutely horrible human being. He does something internal that you can actually watch on screen not unlike the method acting process itself as he commences with playing a game he is so well versed in (namely seduction of the deeply virtuous) that he practically does it with hands tied behind his back. By the time he realizes that the line behind which he claims no "illusions"exist is crossed, it is much too late.
My absolute favorite scene in this movie is another completely wordless one, which could not have conveyed it's message more powerfully in any other way. It is the scene in which Valmont realizes he's in love with Madame deTourvel the pious married woman he is determined to seduce. They are all in attendance at an intimate classical singing performance when de Tourvel arrives, and her presence is like something you can feel rising up and driving wedge between the perverse but tight bond between Valmont and de Marteuil. She sits a few seats down from the couple and smiles politely at him. It's like watching him take a bullet. He is nearly undone by her effect on him and astonished possibly that he is even capable of feeling it. Madame deMarteuil watches all of this cooly and with learned dismissiveness as if she is not also reeling from it's affects. Valmont tries to compensate for this momentary lapse by kissing de Martueil's hand as a way of affirm his singular devotion to her, but it's too obvious and for the viewer appears to more strongly declare his genuine affections for Madame deTourvel.
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| "Her eyes are beginning to close." |
There is not one frame, not one move, not one word in this film which has not been calculated to a most intelligent perfection. Everything about it is done masterfully, set design, shots, historical period costumes, music. It is a ballet of wickedness about two very very very bad people who play the most dangerous game of all.
Glenn Close as the Marquis deMarteuil and John Malkovich as Valmont are at the top of their game in every move they make. They meet each other as equals in every scene matching wit for wit and topping one another at every evil turn.
However it's watching Malkovich in this film that always gets to me. He does things so nuanced and clever, so insanely brilliant in this role that I believe them to be yet still unrealized. With a deadpan, near sickening nonchalance, he delivers a performance that engages you through subtly built up emotional layers to empathize with an absolutely horrible human being. He does something internal that you can actually watch on screen not unlike the method acting process itself as he commences with playing a game he is so well versed in (namely seduction of the deeply virtuous) that he practically does it with hands tied behind his back. By the time he realizes that the line behind which he claims no "illusions"exist is crossed, it is much too late.
My absolute favorite scene in this movie is another completely wordless one, which could not have conveyed it's message more powerfully in any other way. It is the scene in which Valmont realizes he's in love with Madame deTourvel the pious married woman he is determined to seduce. They are all in attendance at an intimate classical singing performance when de Tourvel arrives, and her presence is like something you can feel rising up and driving wedge between the perverse but tight bond between Valmont and de Marteuil. She sits a few seats down from the couple and smiles politely at him. It's like watching him take a bullet. He is nearly undone by her effect on him and astonished possibly that he is even capable of feeling it. Madame deMarteuil watches all of this cooly and with learned dismissiveness as if she is not also reeling from it's affects. Valmont tries to compensate for this momentary lapse by kissing de Martueil's hand as a way of affirm his singular devotion to her, but it's too obvious and for the viewer appears to more strongly declare his genuine affections for Madame deTourvel.
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