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What is it about Choderlos de Laclos’s 1782 exposé of upper-class misbehavior that transcends times and cultures? Is it the perennial theme of the powerful and corrupt despoiling the innocent through hypocrisy, deceit, manipulation, and superior bons mots? Or the suggestion that true love has the rueful last laugh? Les liaisons dangerousness has endured a 1959 update by Roger Vadim, a 1980 Czechoslovakian TV adaptation, back-to-back period extravaganzas by Stephen Frears and Milos Forman, and a 1999 teenage sex comedy starring Reese Witherspoon and Sarah Michelle Gellar. The most satisfying rendition, though, is Korean director E J-yong’s Untold Scandal, which is set in 19th-century Korea, in the latter days of the superficially Confucian but at heart deliciously decadent Chosun Dynasty. Maybe it’s the performance of Bae Yong-jun as Jo-won, the notorious womanizing aristocrat who wagers with his equally depraved cousin, Lady Cho (Lee Mi-sook), to possess Lady Sook (Jeon Do-Yeon), a beautiful widow known as "The Gates of Chastity." Combining epicurean elegance with stoic tragedy, Bae makes a flawed and magnificent hero. Or perhaps it’s E’s visual underlining of the story’s deeper ironies. In one scene, he has a bemused Jo-won meet Kwon In-ho (Cho Hyeon-jae), a callow youth just getting entangled in his better’s twisted games. Dressed identically and separated by a wall, they are mirror images. Symbolism aside, this may be the most rapturously photographed film of the year, and, with its excruciatingly delicate amours, the most erotic. Certainly it is one of the most moving; failure to recognize it as the consummate version of Choderlos’s tale would be scandalous indeed. In Korean with English subtitles. (124 minutes)
BY PETER KEOUGH
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