Les Liaisons Dangereuses 1960

Valmont (Gérard Philipe) and Juliette (Jeanne Moreau) in Les Liaisons Dangereuses 1960.
Image source: Paris Cinéma Région

Les Liaisons Dangereuses 1960 (released September 1959), screenplay adapted from the novel by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos by Roger Vailland, Roger Vadim and Claude Brulé; directed by Vadim.

"We must not think that in saying yes to sex one says no to power." (Michel Foucault) [1]

Confirmation of Foucault's insight, should any be needed, can be found in writer/director Roger Vadim's Barbarella (1968), an attempt at a science fiction sex comedy starring his pre-consciousness-raised wife Jane Fonda clad in see-through plastic. Not even successful as camp, Barbarella's reflection of the new sexual mores in society and in cinema in the late 1960s was instantly dated, a textbook example of the voyeuristic male gaze. (And indeed the March 1968 issue of Playboy featured the pictorial "The Girls of Barbarella"; Fonda, by the way, was 30 years old.) It is to the sophomoric Barbarella's everlasting shame that it was released in the same year as Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke's 2001: A Space Odyssey. [2]

But a decade earlier Vadim wrote and directed a movie that could be mistaken as a product of the French New Wave. Les Liaisons Dangereuses 1960 is an updating of Pierre Choderlos de Laclos' 1782 novel of aristocratic libertinage to the milieu of the Parisian haute-bourgeoisie in the late 1950s. Vadim seems to have explicitly modelled Liaisons on Louis Malle's Ascenseur pour l'échafaud (Elevator to the Gallows, 1958). Like Malle's film, Liaisons is shot in black and white, stars Jeanne Moreau, and is set to a superb jazz soundtrack (by Thelonious Monk and Art Blakey & the Jazz Messengers in Liaisons, by Miles Davis in Ascenseur).

Valmont (Gérard Philipe in his next-to-last film) and Juliette (Moreau) are a married couple who have reached an understanding. Their mutual sexual spark has died, although apparently it's more extinguished in Juliette than in Valmont, and they each take other lovers. He is open about it, which makes him a target of endless gossip, and Juliette is discreet. She is so discreet, in fact, that many of the couple's friends consider her a model wife, enabling her to use her reputation for virtue as a shield to keep unwanted admirers such as Prevan (Boris Vian) at a distance (at least, until they are useful to her). But although Valmont and Juliette have agreed to sleep with other people, they've also agreed to be completely honest with each other; they have vowed "not to accept the lies that degrade other couples." [3]

Juliette and Cécile (Jeanne Valérie) in Les Liaisons Dangereuses 1960.
Image source: Notre Cinéma

Juliette sets Valmont the task of seducing the virginal teenaged Cécile (Jeanne Valérie). Cécile's parents have been looking to get her married; to get them off her back she has betrothed herself to the wealthy Jerry Court (Nicholas Vogel), who is twice her age. Unbeknownst both to Cécile's parents and herself, Court is one of Juliette's current lovers. Meanwhile, Cécile is in love with another man, college student Danceny (Jean-Louis Trintignant, who was actually closer to Vogel's age than Valérie's). Juliette tells Valmont that she wants him to help her revenge herself on her self-satisfied lover Court: "He thinks he is marrying virtue, but he must marry vice." Her revenge, it turns out, will engulf not only Court, Cécile and Danceny, but ultimately Valmont, and herself.

That Juliette's name is shared with the Marquis de Sade's anti-heroine is no accident. Both characters view sex as the surest, and often for women the sole, means to power. As Angela Carter has written, "[De Sade's Juliette] is a woman who acts according to the precepts and also the practice of a man's world and so she does not suffer. Instead, she causes suffering." [4]

One of the many who suffer at the hands of Liaisons' Juliette is the devout Madame de Tourvel (Annette Vadim, the director's wife; paging Dr. Freud). Madame de Tourvel has also succumbed to Valmont's seductive stratagems, and the adulterous couple are, for a short time, blissfully happy.

Valmont and Madame de Tourvel (Annette Vadim) in Les Liaisons Dangereuses 1960.
Image source: Paris Cinéma Région

But Juliette accuses Valmont of violating their pact, and gives him an ultimatum. He looks on silently as she sends Madame de Tourvel a telegram in his name:

My Angel, one becomes bored of anything, it's a law of nature. Stop. I took you with pleasure and I leave you without regret. Stop. Good-bye. Stop. That's the way of the world. Stop. It's not my fault. Stop. Valmont.

Madame de Tourvel receives the telegram just after she has told her husband that she is leaving him for Valmont; her abrupt abandonment drives her into madness.

The updating of the novel works surprisingly well. To the novel's letters the film adds phone calls, tape recordings, and Juliette's telegram; most of the translations required by the temporal leap forward by nearly two centuries maintain the spirit of the original. Some "modern" touches don't work so well, however. There's a scene where a jazz band (Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers) sends women into an orgiastic frenzy of dancing, like something out of Joseph March's The Wild Party (1928). And Vadim gives a smarmy introduction to the film in which he Explains It All To Us; one of its more memorable lines concerns "young women freed from sex-related social constraints and that burst open, buoyantly, like ripe fruits."

Vadim's introduction suggests that Juliette is escaping the sexual double standard, but in fact she is conforming to it. And we never learn the source of Juliette's desire for vengeance against Valmont, and, indeed, all men (her destruction of the happiness of Cécile and Madame de Tourvel is ultimately aimed at the men in their lives). In Laclos' novel Merteuil tells Valmont that she is "born to revenge my sex and command yours," and goes on to say that "I must conquer or perish." [5] Merteuil's anger at the enforced subordination of women is largely absent from Vadim's film. Instead, we're left to surmise that an earlier betrayal by Valmont is what motivates Juliette's coldness and malice. Merteuil's rebellion against the proscriptions imposed on women by men, portrayed so vividly in Laclos' novel, is replaced by an intramarital power struggle. 

Moreau as Juliette. Image source: Notre Cinéma

Les Liaisons Dangereuses 1960 succeeds on its own terms: it's sleek and chic and has excellent leads in Gérard Philipe and Jeanne Moreau, who are flattered by the gorgeous black-and-white photography of Marcel Grignon. [6] But it could have been much more. That would have required, though, some self-critical reflection on the part of Vadim, whose later career demonstrates that he forever remained a prisoner of the idea that women's sexual freedom should primarily benefit men.

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1. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality vol. 1: An Introduction, a translation by Robert Hurley of Histoire de la sexualité: la volonté de savoir (The History of Sexuality: The Will to Knowledge), Pantheon, 1978, p. 157.
2. Vadim made a specialty of films showcasing the bodies of young actresses who were by pure coincidence his lovers, for example in Et Dieu. . .créa la femme (And God Created Woman, 1956) with his then-wife Brigitte Bardot. Liaisons features a nude scene with Vadim's new wife Annette Strøyberg, who was 9 years his junior and looks remarkably similar to Bardot (blonde hair, wide-set eyes, pouty lips). He would go on to write and direct Le Vice et la Vertu (Vice and Virtue, 1963), a retelling of the Marquis de Sade's Justine featuring his teenaged lover Catherine Deneuve.
3. Quotes from the screenplay are taken from Roger Vadim's Les Liaisons Dangereuses, screenplay by Roger Vailland, Roger Vadim and Claude Brulé, translated by Bernard Shir-Cliff. Ballantine Books, 1962.
   
4. Angela Carter, The Sadeian Woman and the Ideology of Pornography, Pantheon, 1978, p. 79. 
5. Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, Les Liaisons Dangereuses, 1782, translated anonymously as  Dangerous Connections, 1812, J. Ebers. Letter LXXXI: https://archive.org/details/dangerousconnec00laclgoog/page/n459/mode/1up
6. Grignon often worked as the cinematographer on films directed by André Hunebelle, including Les 3 Mousquetaires (1953), Le capitan (1960), Les mystères de Paris (1962), Fantômas (1964), and Fantômas contre Scotland Yard (1967).