Roger Vadim takes his patented obsessions with beauty and the tawdry, destructive behavior that inevitably accompanies it to the French literary classic LES LIAISONS DANGEREUSES, Choderlos de Laclos's scathing 18th-century epistolary novel. Jeanne Moreau and Gérard Philipe play Valmont and Juliette, two equally beautiful and equally cruel married hipsters scouring the smoky and chic underworld of beatnik-tinged 1960 Paris for their next amorous victims. A highly charged jazz soundtrack (by Thelonious Monk) underscores the decadence as Valmont and Juliette compare and contrast their cruel infidelities, each trying to outdo the other. When Valmont's latest obsession, Marianne (played by Vadim's wife, Annette), begins to capture his heart, the game is up and Juliette seeks revenge, bringing destruction and disaster in her wake. Moreau and Philipe inject their characters with sultry new-wave hipness, giving the film a cool and devastating contemporary pathos. Vadim's transposition of the casual cruelties and excruciatingly subtle protocols of 18th-century French court life is uncannily accurate, and the director brings themes developed in his earlier masterpiece, AND GOD CREATED WOMAN, to a sophisticated crescendo of visual and psychological eroticism, romance, and ennui.