REVIEW: ‘Dangerous Liaisons’ (2022) – An Ending Hardly Worth the Journey

Dangerous Liaisons (Les Liaisons Dangereuses) is a French-language Netflix Original teen romance by Rachel Suissa based on the book by Choderlos de Laclos. When Célène (Paola Locatelli) moves to beachy Biarritz for her senior year, she’s expecting a quiet year away from Paris and the grief her and her father are consumed by after the loss of her mother. Instead, she meets Tristan (Simon Rérolle), which becomes a problem given she’s already engaged to somebody else. Some utterly messy teenage drama ensues from here.

Frankly, I don’t think that Dangerous Liaisons is all that bad. But to get one thing that is atrocious out of the way at the start though: this movie features numerous instances of people (well, really one person) posting videos of her classmates having sex, filmed without their knowledge and posted without consent with the intention of shaming them. It’s absolutely abhorrent and there are moments where the movie acts as if it’s totally fine and a normal course of rich teenage affairs. It doesn’t result in any longstanding consequences for the victims, in fact, it turns out well in the end for literally everyone involved besides the culprit, but it’s still just gross and the lack of condemnation on the film’s part, in my book, is unforgivable, let alone that it wasn’t even necessary to depict in the first place.

The movie is a mess from beginning to end, really. Sometimes in frustrating ways, like when some of its social media usages feel like they go overboard and feel repetitive, or when the soundtrack never stops for a minute to breathe in between songs. It’s very difficult to get a read on any of the characters for pretty much the entire movie, whether it’s Tristan being constantly selfish and unbecoming, or Célène being annoyingly naive about when she’s getting played. The same goes for all of the side characters really. Most of them are annoying until the very end where you’re expected to just suddenly forget how bad everyone has been to each other and accept that they’re all forgiven and happy now.

But you know what, sometimes you’re just willing to let go of the first 90 percent of a movie and accept that everything is actually fine in the end. The worst of the mean people stop being mean. A diverse-looking cast filled with queer characters get happy endings. There’s even a love triangle that actually ends in a three-way relationship that’s completely loving, healthy, and unwaveringly accepted. I’m totally fine with admitting that the ending was at least satisfying, even if the journey there was hardly worth it.

And it was hardly worth it. I don’t feel like I learned anything about any character. Every thread of character that’s suggested is dropped two scenes later for something new or is just twisted up in Tristan and queen of the school Vanessa’s (Ella Pellegrini) weird relationship and its cruel games. It’s so easy to just accept that everyone’s happy in the end, despite pretty much everyone in the movie doing pretty terrible things to somebody else at some point, when the characters are such totally blank slates in the first place. You can put whatever moralization or character traits you might presume onto any of them, from side characters to the main ones, because their range of characteristics are each so minuscule.

It’s a movie that has its moments throughout. There’s a nice use of social media early on and some genuine moments between characters. They’re just usually undermined by repetitive visuals or those same characters sucking moments later. I know that teens are fickle and their personalities are malleable and they’re subject to being rather awful to one another, especially, I can imagine, rich and privileged ones like these. But when they’re so capricious with seemingly no way to tell when they’re being genuine or part of some scheme, it’s a chore to decifer.

I think that Dangerous Liaisons is a fair enough movie. It truly does a lot right when it comes to where its characters end up. It’s just that the journey there is fraught and often simply disinteresting given the lack of discernable personalities in most of its characters besides “mean to others,” or worse.

Dangerous Liaisons is streaming now on Netflix.