There are no heroes in Les Liaisons dangereuses, Pierre Choderlos de Laclos’s epistolary novel of cold-blooded decadence in the same French court that would be violently overthrown a few years after its publication in 1782. Chief among its villains is Marquise Isabelle de Merteuil, a master manipulator who takes advantage of her former lover Vicomte Sébastien de Valmont’s resurgent desire for her with a wager that ultimately dooms them both. As a teenage Fiona Apple dryly noted: “It’s a sad, sad world when a girl will break a boy just because she can.”
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The Seduction, HBO Max’s first French-language series and approximately the millionth onscreen iteration of Laclos’s masterwork, imagines just what that world might entail. (The premiere is streaming now, with subsequent episodes arriving on Fridays through Dec. 19.) If you’ve read the book or watched the canonical film adaptation starring Glenn Close and John Malkovich—or even the 1990s teen drama update, Cruel Intentions—you probably won’t be surprised by the endgame of this lush, deliciously acted, baroquely libidinous yet sneakily substantive miniseries. Created by Jean-Baptiste Delafon and directed by Jessica Palud, the six-episode drama not only makes Merteuil its protagonist, but also supplies backstory that recasts her as less a monster than a wounded woman fighting for the same freedom men enjoy.
A fairy tale cold open sees young Isabelle (a magnetic Anamaria Vartolomei) flee the drudgery of a convent to marry her beloved—a union consummated with swooning tenderness. Then the credits roll, and Laclos’s reality sets in. Isabelle awakens the next day alone and deceived. Her husband doesn’t exist; the man she slept with is really the notorious rake Valmont (Vincent Lacoste, brooding like a Gallic Jeremy Allen White), who invented a false identity and orchestrated a sham wedding just to get her into bed. Just when it seems as though her only options are a punitive transfer to an even more austere convent or suicide, Isabelle insinuates herself into the libertine circle of Valmont’s aunt and accomplice, Madame de Rosemonde (Diane Kruger in Close mode). It’s through her that Isabelle enacts her revenge, ascending the aristocracy to torment the man who humiliated her. The aging Rosemonde has her own reasons for making this alliance. Rejected by her mean, debauched lover, the Comte de Gercourt (Emily in Paris hunk Lucas Bravo), she plans to use the nubile Isabelle as a sort of bargaining chip.
And so the game of musical bedchambers begins, featuring many familiar names and storylines. The Seduction teems with so much omnisexual, female-gaze revelry, it makes Bridgerton seem prudish. This is historical bodice-ripping done right, albeit with the occasional lost-in-translation moment (maybe Jeff Buckley’s “Hallelujah” cover has yet to become a soundtrack cliché on the continent). Philosophy is as quintessentially French as romance, though. The show grounds its hedonism in the epiphany that, especially for women living under patriarchy, sex can be an expression of love or a way of exerting power, but things get messy when you confuse the two. While the former requires vulnerability, the latter forbids it—and both apparent paths to liberation start to look more like prisons.
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