Midway through HBO Max’s first French-language series, “The Seduction,” its heroine, Isabelle de Merteuil, rallies after a vicious attack on her character by the powerful Comte de Gercourt. Plotting her revenge, she tells her mentor, Madame de Rosemonde, that she wants more than simple retaliation.
“I want fear to change sides,” she says, presenting the issue at the heart of this six-part series: Is it possible for a woman to wield power over men and survive?
If the characters’ names sound familiar, that’s because “The Seduction,” which premieres Friday, is yet another take on Choderlos de Laclos’s 1782 epistolary novel, “Les Liaisons Dangereuses” and its irresistible tale of sexual intrigue and power.
The book’s most famous adaptation is probably Stephen Frears’ 1988 film, “Dangerous Liaisons” (itself an adaptation of Christopher Hampton’ s 1985 play), starring Glenn Close as Madame de Merteuil and John Malkovich as the her co-conspirator and adversary, the Vicomte de Valmont. But there have been many others, including films set in a Manhattan private school and among French teenagers obsessed with social media; as well as a Starz television series that had Merteuil as a sex worker and Valmont as a disaffected aristocratic mapmaker.
Perhaps every decade gets a version of “Liaisons” for its time.
“The Seduction” is a loose adaptation, focusing on the Marquise de Merteuil (in French, the show is simply “Merteuil”) through a back story that incorporates some of the novel’s narrative strands.
“It’s an amazing story, which is why it has been adapted so often,” said Jessica Palud, who directed and co-wrote the series with Jean-Baptiste Delafon (“Baron Noir”). “And it’s a terrible tale; the characters are horrible. I was interested in asking why.”
Palud was filming “Being Maria,” about the life of the actress Maria Schneider, when HBO and the producers of “The Seduction” approached her. “I love the novel and the Frears film, but I first thought it’s not adaptable again,” she said in an interview at a luxe Paris hotel. “Then they proposed doing it from Merteuil’s point of view.”
Other adaptations usually show Valmont as the central figure, she said. “Now, it’s the story of a young woman. Why does she become the character we see in the novel? You could say that Isabelle’s story is the #MeToo of her time.”
“We got to a real female focus,” Palud said: “three generations of women who are trying to live their lives, and particularly Isabelle, who says, ‘I am going to explode these codes we are supposed to live by.’”
Palud immediately approached Anamaria Vartolomei, who played the title role in “Being Maria,” for the role of Isabelle.
Vartolomei said the character remained opaque even to herself. “She tries to survive and sees her fragility as a flaw,” the actress said. “To be a powerful woman, she mustn’t show emotion, so the work as an actor was to express through her eyes.”
All the characters, Vartolomei added, “are both vulnerable and cruel, even grotesque sometimes. When they look at themselves in the mirror, they don’t know who they are, because they are lost behind the masks.”
HBO wasn’t actively looking for a historical series for its first French-language venture, said Clémentine Bobin, a senior creative executive for HBO Max in France. “You can feel a bit distrustful about twists on things, but this idea felt very strong,” she said.
Delafon said he had focused on the novel’s personalities rather than the plot, even though some of its elaborate dance of sexual pairings enters at a later stage. “I wanted to create an emotional journey,” he said. “How did Merteuil and Valmont meet? What was the love, the broken promise, the manipulation, the trauma at the core of everything?”
Central to that is Madame de Rosemonde, played by Diane Kruger. She is Valmont’s aunt, who initially takes part in deceiving Isabelle, then recruits her to a world of libertine aristocrats who indulge in sexual adventure.
Kruger said in an interview that, whereas Rosemonde was a secondary character in the book, “here she is actually closest to the Glenn Close role.”
Rosemonde chooses her lovers as she pleases, but it’s still a life of limited freedom, Kruger said. “I had a lot of compassion for the character,” she added. “I could feel that rage in her.”
Vincent Lacoste, who plays Valmont, said he had approached the role thinking there was no point in giving a sinister, Malkovich-type performance. “In any case, the series has a different approach,” he said. “It asks: What does the great seducer of his time do when he falls in love?”
The show’s real villain is Gercourt, a powerful libertine and rival to Valmont, played by Lucas Bravo of “Emily in Paris” fame with panther-like malevolence.
“Gercourt is barely present in the novel, so it was like being handed a pen to write a chapter of ‘Les Liaisons Dangereuses,’” Bravo said. “I think Gercourt wants to be seen, and Isabelle sees him for who he really is. He is threatened by that, but also drawn to her.”
Everything the characters say, he added, “is the opposite of what they think.”
That’s because for the libertines, Delafon said, “life was theater and language was a weapon.”
Mastering the polished, elaborate formalities of speech was challenging, said Kruger, who is German. “French is so circumlocutious, and I’d be like, ‘What are we talking about?’” she said.
Even the French actors had to adjust.
“The text was very beautiful, quite poetic, and not at all the way we speak now,” Lacoste said. “You had to really absorb the musicality of the language so that it sounded natural.”
Although the dialogue “isn’t really how they spoke in the 18th century, we wanted it to evoke that world,” Delafon said. “The show didn’t have to try to be modern, because it’s about love and power — these stakes are still with us today.”
Does Isabelle prevail in her quest for power and liberty? “It’s the struggle inside the character that is interesting,” Vartolomei said. “I want to do this, and society says I can’t. How brave will I be?”
The post In ‘The Seduction,’ a ‘Dangerous Liaisons’ for This Moment appeared first on New York Times.
