Fridae

Les liaisons dangereuses gets yet another film remake but the story remains superficially the same: the chastity and reputation of a naïve débutante is the subject of wager between the Rake and the Cougar Matron, two high society frenemies. For her, it's payback for a former lover who just jilted her for this sweet young thing. For him, it's a chance to deflower more maidens. Not content with just ruining young women (it's way too easy for the Rake), the frenemies also place a heftier side bet on whether a staid and virtuous lady living with the Rake's elder relative can be seduced. The Rake gets to bed the Cougar Matron if he succeeds.

The 1988 adaptation with John Malkovich, Glenn Close, and Michelle Pfeiffer hewed to the Ancien Regime setting while the 2003 Korean retelling deposited the actors in the strait-laced, ultra-Confucian Joseon dynasty. These two very different film story settings worked well by showing how a society ostensibly based on rigid codes of conduct, etiquette, and propriety can still be a hunting ground for amoral sexual predators who are outwardly virtuous, upstanding citizens and role models. What makes Les liaisons dangereuses a biting social comedy in both 1988 and 2003 is how the two frenemies waltz through the disjuncture between outward appearance and private proclivities, societal code and widespread perversions with unbridled cynicism and malice.

This Chinese-Korean adaptation is set in the heady days of 1930s jazz age Shanghai, before the arrival of the Imperial Japanese army ended the party. It's a curious choice. To be sure, one could always appreciate the local period colour — tea houses and Chinese opera co-existing alongside dance halls and jazz bands, a Shanghai of homeless refugees displaced from Manchukuo jostling with nouveaux riche who live in colonial mansions stocked with Empire style furniture. It's all well and good, except it's not a setting one would choose for a straight retelling of the novel. For all its charm, Heo Jin-Ho's vision of 1930s Shanghai isn't anywhere near a strait-laced, moralistic society where the proceedings of such dangerous liaisons would be a shocking, untold scandal as compared to say officially corruption-free modern China and Singapore, both currently rocked by corruption and sex scandals.

The second misstep is also conceptual: there isn't a real sense of the near-absolute cynicism, amorality and malice in Jang Dong-Gun's Rake and Cecilia Cheung's Cougar Matron. This has the unfortunate effect of reducing this film adaptation to a sentimental melodrama about a high society playboy who finds true love tragically belatedly — which isn't really what Dangerous Liaisons ought to be about. Either the script is afraid to go where it should, or the casting is so off that the Rake comes across as a playboy whose modus operandi is breaking hearts (but not specifically ruining respectable women) and a too-young Cecilia Cheung lacks credibility as a Cougar Matron whose malice one suspects is directed at younger, more beautiful women because ravishing as she still is, her youth and beauty will fade, leaving behind an intellect that can't be taken seriously in male-dominated society.

That said, Heo Jin-Ho's Dangerous Liaisons is a well-shot film with beautiful sets that evoke the best colours of period Shanghai. It's a pity that he hasn't articulated a vision of the genteel code and hypocrisy of Shanghai's polite society, unlike Hou Hsiao Hsien in his Flowers of Shanghai.