Tuesday, May 06, 2008

I finally watched Dangerous Liaisons the movie last night. Obviously scintillating stuff as Russell slept through most of it. But what a stellar cast. A very young Keanu Reeves along with a perky Uma Thurman and a still sly even at the tender age of whatever Peter Capaldi all featured along the headline actors. The only person I didn't recognise was the lady that Russell persists in calling "The Old Woman", Madame de Rosemonde.

It was delightful seeing my lines spoken (by beautiful Michelle Pfeiffer) on the big screen. Irritatingly I kept muttering the next line in the right place until I was sharply told to shut up. And it was interesting to see quite how much of poor Christopher Hampton's precious dialogue they'd hacked out. Madame de Merteuil had much much less to say than she appears to have in the play which seemed rather a shame. But I suppose that's the virtue of film - you can show things rather than just talking about them.

And aside from some rather dodgy camera work here and there - designed I think to build the sense of menace from Valmont - I liked it. It does feel a little dated now. And their accents were terrible (hark at who's talking). Although Peter was allowed to retain his Scots drawl which was great. But a nice revision exercise. I don't believe that I have memorised Michelle's performance, only to execute it perfectly at the next rehearsal. But we'll let DG be the judge of that.

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home