Miloš Forman brings Choderlos de Laclos's eighteenth-century scheming to the screen in Valmont, a costume drama built entirely around a bet nobody involved can afford to lose.
What is Valmont about?
In the years before the French Revolution, a widow learns that the man she loves is about to marry her cousin's young daughter. Rather than confront him directly, she turns to the playboy Valmont and asks him to seduce and ruin the girl before the wedding can happen. To make sure he commits to the task, she wagers her own body against his success, turning a private act of revenge into a contest with real stakes for everyone drawn into it. As Valmont sets his plan in motion, the line between a calculated seduction and a real entanglement starts to blur, complicating a scheme that was supposed to stay purely tactical.
About the cast
Colin Firth plays Valmont opposite Annette Bening's widow, with Meg Tilly, Fairuza Balk, Siân Phillips, Jeffrey Jones and Henry Thomas filling out the aristocratic circle around them. The younger, less overtly theatrical cast gives the scheming a more intimate, human register than a purely stylized costume piece might otherwise carry.
Context & significance
Set among the French aristocracy in the years leading up to 1789, the film treats its pre-revolutionary setting as a closed social world governed entirely by reputation, boredom and leisure — a backdrop where a private wager can escalate into something that affects several lives at once. That sense of a society with too much time and too little consequence is what gives the central scheme its momentum.
Watching Valmont on Ktime
Valmont is available on K-Time with Farsi dubbing and Farsi subtitles. Watching requires logging into a free K-Time account, while the film's page can be browsed without one — part of a catalogue built with Persian-speaking audiences in mind.