What To Expect From Starz's Bold Reimagining of Dangerous Liaisons
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Pierre Choderlos de Laclos's 18th century novel Les Liaisons Dangereuses has been adapted in countless forms over the years, including a 1988 movie starring Glenn Close, and a modernized teen version in 1999's Cruel Intentions. This fall, Starz will launch a fresh new adaptation which is billed as "a prelude" to the original story, and stars Alice Englert and Nicholas Denton as warring lovers Camille and Valmont.
Far from a staid period drama, this Dangerous Liaisons promises to be a diverse, sexually fluid and contemporary take on the source material, and will begin with Camille and Valmont as passionate young lovers in pre-revolutionary Paris, who ruthlessly seduce and manipulate their way from the slums of the city to the highest levels of aristocracy.
"I think that story of a woman navigating a man’s world is hugely powerful today, and that very divided society between rich and poor has great resonance now," creator Harriet Warner said at the Television Critics Association summer press tour this week, discussing the timeliness of the show. She added that while she took some cues from previous adaptations—particularly Christopher Hampton's 1885 stage play—she focused on going back to a blank slate and reinventing the central character of the Marquise de Merteuil, who here becomes Camille.
"For me, in going back to the book, I was really struck by one letter in particular, Letter 81," Warner explained. "It's about this sense that [Merteuil] had created herself from nothing. There was a real space, a real blank page, where you sense that, and she states it. She is a construct. Everything about her she has very consciously developed. That really was the starting point to think, actually, there's a huge space here to reinvent something. And that was the excitement for me, to find there's a new story to tell."
Englert, who plays Camille, added that the show focuses on the tempestuous passion between Camille and Valmont, which sometimes takes the form of love, and sometimes... does not. "I think what’s interesting about the story is that if it’s not love, it’s war. And if it’s war, is it love? Some of the most compelling feelings I’ve had about another person certainly haven’t been love. They might have been lust or obsession, or maybe you recognize something injured in them that’s injured in you. But love kind of is not nearly as interesting as what these two have for each other."
Though a heterosexual love story remains at the center, there will be a queer element to this version of Dangerous Liaisons. "I feel like Camille is queer like myself," Englert said, clearly choosing her words carefully to avoid spoilers. "I don't think she's... I mean, you'll see." Warner added that there is a "fluidity" to the world of the show and its characters. "The show is kind of blowing apart constraints and [not] conforming to gender stereotypes. I think it's a really bold reimagining of the world of Dangerous Liaisons."
The plan is for Dangerous Liaisons to span multiple seasons, and season one is a prequel of sorts to the characters that book fans know and love. "Over the course of hopefully multiple seasons, our characters will get to that point that we meet them in the novel, of real moral compromise and corruption," Warner said. "We go with them on that journey in Season 1 but there is still innocence."
Englert added that season one focuses on the vulnerability that Camille and Valmont "then do everything they possibly can to shed themselves of. It's set back in the day when they were dreamers. Before they were nightmares, you know?"
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