Valmont

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Ron S Feb 8, 2019 Speaking to Ebert around the time of its release, Milos Forman relayed a conversation the director had with his screenwriter, where the latter pointed out that "there is not one thing we have so far in the script that's in the book." Taking the Frears adaptation the year prior as more genuinely adherent to the text, what makes this iteration so much more relevant, alive, and modern---even as it dons the aesthetic style of a conventional period piece, with its slow pacing and austere long shots---is precisely the sense of continuity the film implies between the class system of 1780s and that of the 1980s (a point that only anachronistically can be afforded the French text). If the Frears version ultimately echoes the morality tale melodrama of the original novel, a story where the debauched in the end get their just desserts, then Forman's film shifts the emphasis instead to the political structures underlying social mores, a narrative not about the corruption of the innocent or the redemption of the dissolute, but something closer to a Bildungsroman where the young are instructed in the materialism and wantonness of the world, made to give up romantic idealism for social careerism. Though the pace is slower, the narrative more unwieldy, the characters a bit blurrier, and the lead performances less seductively captivating---albeit with far better turns by the supporting cast, echoing the different focus---VALMONT is the crueler film precisely because it is the colder one, less forgivably modern and so more monstrous in its unflinching presentation of class hierarchy. See more

Theodore W May 7, 2017 Like Jack Clayton's The Great Gatsby, it should be ripped from its literary routes and therefore treated as seperate material. As a film, Milos Forman's Valmont is suspenseful, rewarding, and thoroughly entertaining. See more

Kylo S Mar 14, 2016 F 8.0 [Milos Forman]

Hermione G Sep 18, 2007 Milos Forman's meticulously produced Valmont is an extremely well-acted period piece that suffers from its too stately pacing and lack of dramatic high points. See more

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Valmont

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