Cruel Intentions

Roger Kumble’s film moves Choderlos de Laclos’s 1782 novel Les Liaisons dangereuses into a Manhattan high school. It was Kumble’s first job as a director, and cinematographer Theo van de Sande says he had made nothing before it, not a short, a commercial or a documentary, not even a home movie. Van de Sande operated the camera himself and got in trouble with the union. The New York the film sells is largely assembled. Only three days of the shoot happened there: the mansion is the Harry F. Sinclair House in Manhattan, the garden scenes are Old Westbury Gardens in Nassau County, and the rest is Los Angeles. Watch it for the city and you are watching borrowed facades. The ending is where the budget went. Kumble wrote the close directly to Bitter Sweet Symphony by The Verve, then learned the track was caught in a rights dispute over a Rolling Stones sample. Producer Neal Moritz puts the cost at close to a million dollars, roughly ten per cent of the budget. It was called Cruel Inventions first. A good fit if you are here for the traps Kathryn and Sebastian set for each other rather than for the plot. Not for viewers who will bristle at how late Annette is allowed to learn she was the wager.