Dangerous Liaisons (2022)

A new side of the classic 18th century story from Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, this series serves as a prequel to the tale of warring ex-lovers we’re so familiar with. We start with a young Pascal (Nicholas Denton) Valmont as he runs around Paris with a brothel worker named Camille (Alice Englert). The two are very much in love and want to marry but she is stuck in the servitude of the brothels’s owner and he has no title nor means to pay off her debt. At this point in the story, Valmont is but a lowly mapmaker who was denied his dead father’s fortune by his stepmother and therefore has taken to having affairs with well-to-do women to support his lifestyle. The lovers decide to run off but Valmont is delayed by one of his many conquests while Camille discovers his deceit about his slew of other partners when she comes into possession of all the sexually explicit letters they’ve written him. Camille decides to go to the home of one of the ladies, the Marquis, Genevieve de Mertuil (Lesley Manville), and promises to give back her letters, securing the secrecy of the affair, in exchange for the safety and stability of being the Marquis’ ward. It’s this mentor-mentee relationship that sets Camille on the path to “avenging her sex” as she wages war against Valmont for breaking both her and Genevieve’s hearts. Most of the steamy sex scenes only show Nicholas’s naked top half, however we do get a peek at the lean lothario’s cheeks when one of his regulars gets wind that Camille knows of their fling. She makes him undress in a carriage, then throws away his clothes and kicks him out to walk home in the buff. The real danger here is not getting nearly enough nudity!