Valmont

A few months back TCM ran Miloš Forman's Valmont. I watched it not realizing that it's out of print on DVD. It's going to be on the MGMHD channel this afternoon at 5:05 PM for people who have the channel, as well as a few other times in the next few weeks, but I don't have the channel so I'm not certain how much it's going to be interrupted by commercial breaks.

Colin Firth plays the Vicomte de Valmont an upper-class ladies' man in early 1780s fan. He's got a couple of women in his life, in the form of former girlfriend Merteuil (Annette Bening), now a widow; and the recently-married Mme. de Tourvel (Meg Tilly), whose husband is off in the provinces on government business. There's a lot more complication, however. Merteuil has a new boyfriend in Gercourt (Jeffrey Jones), but he's engaged to be married in an arranged marriage to young Cécile (Fairuza Balk). Cécile's mother is Merteuil's cousin.

Merteuil is a bit of a loose cannon, so she makes several proposals to Valmont. One is that perhaps he should seduce Cécile, so that when Gercourt marries her and goes to consummate the marriage he'll discover that Cécile is in fact not a virgin. But she also makes a bet with Valmont over whether he'll be able to seduce Mme. de Tourvel and, if he can, she'll let him sleep with her again.

Meanwhile, Cécile isn't so sure of whether she wants to go through with the arranged marriage. The thing is, she has a young music teacher Danceny (Henry Thomas) with whom she's in love, and the two have secretly been passing letters back and forth. Cécile's mother discovers this, and she's furious, basically grounding Cécile. This brings Valmont into the picture, as he would be a perfect courier for letters from Cécil to Danceny and vice versa.

So things get quite complicated with everybody getting involved with everybody else. Eventually enough is going to be found out that the whole set of schemes is going to come crashing down, but whose hopes are going to be dashed?

If I had a problem with Valmont, it's that it's got a pretty complex plot that requires paying a lot of attention, and even then it's easy to miss things. That's a bit of a shame, because the acting is pretty good, and the production design is excellent. Valmont is a sumptuous movie to look at, even if the plot at times lets the rest of the movie down.

With its provenance of director and stars, Valmont really deserves to be back in print on DVD.