If "And God ... " is as close as Vadim came to a credo, a guiltless celebration of the pleasures of sex, love, food, sea and sun, it makes sense that his best film revolves around what for him seems the only true sin: the poisoning of pleasure. "Les liaisons dangereuses" (1959; rereleased here about 10 years ago as "Dangerous Liaisons 1960"), a modern-day retelling of Choderlos De Laclos's epistolary novel, is the work of a hedonist moralist with a sting in his tail. The prologue Vadim filmed for the American release, a sly digression in which he assures us that not all married French women are like the calculating temptress Jeanne Moreau plays in the film, sets you up to expect a droll, winking sex farce. And then the movie knocks you flat.

The bourgeois world of late '50s France turns out to be a suitably decadent substitution for the luxuriousness of the 18th century. The regality has been stripped away, but what's left is the story's essence of acrid, bitter gamesmanship. As in Laclos, the world of Vadim's movie is a velvet trap, sealed off from the tedious necessities of everyday life. In this demimonde, where every affair can be counted on to become instant public knowledge, maintaining an appearance of coolly cynical disinterest takes precedence over any adherence to morality. The only protection not afforded its inhabitants is from the claws of their contemporaries. Infidelity makes for good gossip, but nothing as juicy as a fall from privilege.

The lovers who plot to destroy innocents are married here. Valmont (Gerard Philipe in one of his last films; he died shortly afterward at 36) is angling for an ambassadorship, and the charm of his wife, Juliette (Moreau), has brought him near it. The story depends on our being seduced by their amorality (Juliette refuses to sleep with Valmont, explaining she is never unfaithful to her lovers) only to be gradually bothered and finally appalled by the human wreckage they wreak. Expertly scored to the music of Thelonious Monk and Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers, the movie turns Vadim's postcard lyricism (lovers frolicking in the surf) into genuine romantic poignance as Valmont goes beyond the boundaries of his game by falling in love with his conquest Marianne (Stroyberg, presented by her then-husband with a touching vulnerability that makes up her for uneven acting). It's a supremely sophisticated film about the limits of sophistication. As the competition between Valmont and Juliette becomes more and more deadly, we're less and less able to be amused, and more and more, like Valmont, prodded into feeling. And feeling that is awakened out of callousness can be devastating. There are shots that seem to define the characters. Juliette swathed in an ocelot coat walking like a grimly determined hunter through a symmetrical landscape of bare trees; Valmont seen through the slats of a rocking chair that contain him like the bars of a prison cell. Moreau, who becomes more radiant as she becomes more devious, and Philipe, who has the poignancy of a grown man discovering the pang of love, are superb.

"Les liaisons dangereuses" suggests the director that Vadim could have been. But it seems churlish to slight the director he was since the pleasures of his films seem to spring from a pleasure in life itself, and who can blame anyone for choosing life over art? When Moreau's Juliette is disgusted by Valmont's falling in love with Marianne she tells him, "My Valmont was charming. Mme. Tourvel gives me a husband." People magazine reported last week that Bardot, remembering the man who made her a star, called Vadim "seduction itself." Of the men she married after him, she said, "They were only husbands."

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