What a great performance by Close.

The casting of this film shouldn't have worked but it was delicious.

Undoubtedly, my favorite type of villain is the manipulative kind (it's kind of also my favorite type of anti-hero), so Dangerous Liaisons is right up my alley. Glenn Close and John Malkovich are delicious French aristocrats playing games with people's lives, challenging one another to greater and greater deeds of seduction. It's not seduction for sex or conquest, but for cruelty's sake. Their motivations are loftier and more spiritual, which makes them more evil. So what happens when they allow themselves to be touched by a soul they're trying to corrupt? From a distance looking like a boring historical drama, Liaisons is really a darkly comic sex comedy and duel of wit. Great lines abound, and the leads are magnetic. I wish their victims were as richly written, but the epistolary novel the film is drawn from necessarily stayed with certain points of view, so the characters incarnated by Michelle Pfeiffer, Uma Thurman and Keanu Reeves feel a little under-drawn. My one regret is that the film doesn't end some 10 minutes before its actual run time. If it had, the ending would have felt triumphant and left one wanting to see a whole extra film of dark manipulation. As it is, there's a freight train of epilogue that's good, but not as thrilling.