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“When I came out into society,” intones Glenn Close’s Marquise de Merteuil. “I already knew that the role I was condemned to, namely to keep quiet and do what I was told, gave me the perfect opportunity to listen and observe. Not to what people told me, which naturally was of no interest, but to whatever it was they were trying to hide.”

Lasting insights into the depravity of high society, volleyed over a heaving tide of bosoms and backsides, pepper the period frou-frou of Dangerous Liaisons, Stephen Frears’ and Christopher Hampton’s adaptation of the 1782 novel. The powdery, dead-eyed visages of Close’s Merteuil and John Malkovich’s Marquise de Valmont, as two eighteenth-century reprobates locked in a battle of psychosexual manipulation, convey the story’s insistence on the hollowness of respectability more vividly than the novel’s embittered author could ever have dreamed.

The film’s basic plot—two bored, narcissistic aristocrats compete to destroy the lives of their youthful conquests—offers a masterclass in the justification of bad behavior. Choderlos de Laclos’s original novel exposed the workings of the ‘proper’ aristocratic mind skilfully enough to find infamy in public debate (and a place on the personal bookshelf of Marie Antoinette). Frears’ adaptation, enlivened by a stellar cast of bright young toys for the big beasts to play with—from an eighteen year old Uma Thurman to Keanu Reeves—captures the commonalities and unpleasant truths of ‘propriety’ between men and women.

Of the two conspirators, Glenn Close's depiction of a pathological narcissist flinging her withering beauty about as a weapon to indulge an appetite for unlimited personal power marks a chilling portrayals of predatory sexuality. By contrast, Malkovich's mildly prissy Valmont, with his pursed lips and midwestern accent, seems an eccentric accessory to her crimes of the heart, and Michelle Pfeiffer's waiflike Madame de Tourvel a figure of saintly vulnerability.

Once the shock of Malkovich’s combo of powdered wigs and Pittsburgh accents recedes, Valmont emerges not as mincing fop but a man caught in what is finally an unequal struggle. As the story glides elegantly from black comedy to gut-churning tragedy, its reflection of 1780s-slash-1980s decadence and debauchery seeps out of the period setting to touch its audiences with equal force in the present.

Áine Kennedy is a London-based writer and manager of the ScriptUp blog.