Set in France, 1788. The Marquise de Merteuil (Close) needs a favour from her ex-lover, Vicomte de Valmont (Malkovich). Her ex-husband is planning on marrying a young, virtuos, woman called Cecile de Volanges (Thurman). The Marquise would like Valmont to seduce Cecile before her wedding day. Meanwhile Valmont has a conquest of his own in mind, Madame de Tourvel (Pfeiffer), a beautiful, married, and God fearing woman. The Marquise doesn't think that Valmont can do it, she tells him that if he can provide written proof of a sexual encounter with Madame de Tourvel, that she will offer him a reward, one last night with her.

"Dangerous Liaisons," based on the 1782 Choderlos de Laclos novel "Les Liaisons Dangereuses," is tantalizingly wicked -- watching it makes the color rise to your cheeks. From the opening close-up of Glenn Close as she grins with devilish self-satisfaction into her dressing mirror, the picture exerts an insinuating hold. You feel as if it is being whispered in your ear.

Set just prior to the French Revolution, "Dangerous Liaisons" is about sex as gamesmanship, and its spirit is keyed to Close's nakedly malevolent smile. Close plays the Marquise de Merteuil, a Parisian socialite whose days are spent concocting elaborate erotic intrigues, and, poised before her vanity table, she seems majestically corrupt, like an evil queen in a fairy story. With that opening glance, she draws the audience into her confidence, making it a party to her cynical schemes.

It's this sense of complicity that makes the movie such a delectably naughty experience. This sort of wit and immediacy is extraordinarily rare in a period film. Instead of making the action seem far off, the filmmakers put the audience in the room with their characters. The film introduces us to two irresistible scoundrels -- the Marquise and her coconspirator and former lover, the Vicomte de Valmont (John Malkovich). The metaphor for sex that director Stephen Frears and screenwriter Christopher Hampton (who adapted his own play) have set up for exploration is war, and in the movie's opening sequence there's a rush of anticipation as Close and Malkovich, in separate chambers, are coiffed and powdered by their servants for battle. For these players, mere pleasure -- physical pleasure, that is -- is the slightest of motives. Sex -- and its paltry adjunct, love -- is unworthy of these aristocratic combatants; they're beneath them, prosaic, common.

For Valmont and the Marquise, victory is the ultimate pleasure -- the only pleasure. In two of his earlier films -- "My Beautiful Laundrette" and "Sammy and Rosie Get Laid" -- Frears showed a savvy understanding of the games lovers play. Here he glories in the intricacy of the strategies, the forged letters, the elaborate lies. With a few deft, economical strokes, Frears sets the story. Hoping to take her revenge on a betrayer, the Marquise conspires to have Valmont deflower the unwitting Ce'cile de Volanges (Uma Thurman), a virginal convent girl who is to be her enemy's bride and who was chosen expressly for her purity. Though Valmont is always eager to accommodate the Marquise, and the young girl is a luscious prize, the assignment is almost an insult to him. It's too easy.

Instead, Valmont has marked a loftier peak to climb, a luminous beauty well-known for her piety and fidelity named Madame de Tourvel (Michelle Pfeiffer). But the meddling of Ce'cile's mother, Madame de Volanges (Swoosie Kurtz), in the Vicomte's delicate maneuvers gives him reason to effect a plot that will satisfy both himself and the Marquise. All this is done with the casual flourish of a master.

There's a sublime perversity in Frears' casting, especially that of Malkovich. With his coarse jackal's face and lisping effeminacy, Malkovich seems the unlikeliest of Don Juans. But Malkovich brings a fascinating dimension to his character that would be missing with a more conventionally handsome leading man. His presence underlines just how small a role physical beauty plays in seduction. With Malkovich, everything turns on artistry and experience. For him, lovemaking -- like most things -- is a matter of technique, preparation, will. By the time he has lured the innocent Ce'cile into copying her boudoir key for the purpose of delivering the letters of the ardent young Chevalier Danceny (Keanu Reeves), there is no choice left to her but to submit. It was too easy after all.

For this reason, it is inevitable that Valmont and the Marquise become adversaries -- they're the only ones worthy of each other. Close is harder to warm to than Malkovich; she's spinsterish and a little stern -- somehow it's hard to imagine her enjoying a moment of sexual release. But perhaps that's the point Frears hopes to make. The Marquise is an epic dissembler. It's appropriate that some of the scenes are set at the opera -- her deceptions are positively Verdian. Close looks marvelous in the glorious costumes James Acheson has designed for her, but she also seems imprisoned by them. In the same sense, she is imprisoned by her sex, and her anger is what fuels the movie and gives it its propulsive urgency. Sex, jealousy, envy, revenge are so jumbled up in her head that she hardly bothers to separate them. Her impulse, simply, is to exert her influence in the world -- how she exerts herself seems almost beside the point. This is her power. And she uses it willfully, whenever and however she likes, without a thought for the damage.

The Marquise's compulsive destructiveness makes her a character with true classical grandeur. There's something curdled in her. And perhaps this is most evident when Michelle Pfeiffer is onscreen. Of the three principal roles, Pfeiffer's is the least obvious and the most difficult. Nothing is harder to play than virtue, and Pfeiffer is smart enough not to try. Instead, she embodies it. Her porcelain-skinned beauty, in this regard, is a great asset, and the way it's used makes it seem an aspect of her spirituality. Her purity shines through her pores. For this reason, her submission to Valmont is doubly powerful. (Simply the physical contrast is a shock.) When she falls, she falls perilously and deeply.

This was Uma's first major film role, and a massive breakthrough performance. Uma is restricted by her role and subsequently overshadowed by Close and Malkovich, but she bravely stays in character and makes the most out of Cecile. Starting off very prim, proper and meek she is transformed into a sexual creature by the cruel intentions of Close and Malkovich. But she never forgets where she came from, she is still Cecile, she maintains the essential innocence and childlike demeanor of Cecile throughout. She is utterly convincing and believable. Uma's timing is wonderful in this film, which I think is also the sign of good direction.

Cecile goes through three major stages. At first she is the sheltered naïf totally oblivious to the complex nature of social and sexual politics of her time. As Valmont and Merteuil begin to sink their claws into her, she becomes baffled, tortured, but also inquisitive. By the end she has bloomed (or rather, over-ripened) into a promiscuous and unchaste young woman.

For example, when Valmont tells her a story about Cecile mother that would have shocked her before, she instead contemplates it for a moment, then breaks out in laughter. While Cecile is certainly no longer totally naive (check out her reading of a love letter), she is still however under the thumb of Valmont.

Uma is called upon to provide the erotic drive for the film and whether it be with heaving cleavage or flimsy night gowns, Cecile certainly cuts a sensual figure. She is made even more irresistible by her blissful unawareness of this. Uma's nudity in the film caused quite a stir, but she has expressed annoyance that so much attention was placed on it at the expense of the rest of the film. Ironically though, Uma's complaints about the attention to her nude scenes is actually what gets talked about more often that not (which of course I've ended up doing again here). Never the less it was a heads up for Uma, who was no doubt at that time unaware of her own erotic power, and she has since been more cautious about what she reveals on screen.