Cruel Intentions

Director: Roger Kumble (USA). Year of Release: 1999

An expensive psychiatrist’s office in New York. The patient, a young, entitled white man, is complaining that he can’t have a proper psychological issue as he’s a young, entitled, white man. His therapist smiles and presses a signed copy of her book in his hand. He beams gratefully, while she pencils herself a note “bill him for the book”. As the session is drawing towards an end, he starts complimenting her legs, saying that he would love to photograph them.

As the privileged fop leaves her office, the psychiatrist picks up her phone. It’s her daughter, who is distraught. She’s just been dumped by her boyfriend, who she was sure was The One. After all, he complimented her on her legs, then asked if he could photograph her. Now he’s gone, and there are nude photos of her all over the Internet. The psychiatrist looks down at the leering, young man, who was recently in her office and is now rapidly leaving the building.

We soon see the young man, Sebastian, talking to his half-sister Kathryn. He’s getting bored at being able to sleep with every girl at school. Kathryn challenges him to sleep with Cecile – a naive girl who is now seeing her ex. “Sure”, Sebastian says, “no problem”. But he has bigger fish to fry, Annette has just written an article for Seventeen magazine explaining why she’ll stay a virgin before she marries. And she’s just moving to New York as her father will be their new headmaster.

Cruel Intentions is based on Les Liasons Dangereuses, although it seems to be aiming at an entirely different audience. Whereas Laclos’ Eighteenth Century novel was taught to people who studied European Literature, Cruel Intentions is aiming more for fans of Beverly Hills 90210. This is by no means a bad thing in and of itself. Classic literature is too important to be just left to the rich and the educated.

Parts of the film are well worth watching. Reese Witherspoon in particular appears to in a different film to everyone else – one in which people can actually act. Witherspoon plays the virginal Annette, a woman who is much more than a mere stereotype. She is believable as a woman who sincerely believes in preserving her body while not being averse to enjoying herself. A scene in which she pulls faces at the over-earnest Sebastian is a wonder to behold.

This – and the film’s ambition – are the good news. Unfortunately, the story rarely rises above the inevitable stereotypes. This is a film based in the richest area of New York which only works if we show some interest in its entitled cast. In the absence of anything better, we are encouraged to identify with our class enemies. More seriously, it is a film about Gaslighting, in which a man systematically undermines a woman’s self-confidence to make it easier to sleep with her.

It is to the film’s credit that – ultimately – it decides that gaslighting is a Bad Thing and (SEMI-SPOILER ALERT) punishes the people responsible. And yet first it must build up the gaslighter and make us feel that the uncharismatic gaslighter (I hear there are other – wrong – views about Ryan Philippe) is somehow God’s gift to women.. More importantly, we are encouraged to sympathise with Sebastian and made to feel that his entitled behaviour is somehow ok.

Ultimately, you just know where this is all heading. Yes, there is redemption, yes bad behaviour is punished, but there are few surptizes. At the start, Sebastian and Kathryn may be poshoes who don’t understand how normal people live, but at least they have a healthy dose of cynicism. By the end of the film, the necessary rewards for the virtuous and punishment of transgressors cuts them down to size and leads to a very conventional ending.

Cruel Intentions is at its weakest when it tries too hard to be true to the original novel. When it’s not known as the book used as a basis for that John Malkovich film, the book’s main significance is that it was the first novel to be written in the format of an exchange of letters. A film made in 1999 when the Internet and mobile phones were just kicking off has the opportunity to say something about new forms of communication but here it just fudges the issue.

For example, there are probably more letters than you need in a modern film, but there are some sideswipes which don’t really work. Someone says “E-mail is for geeks and paedophiles”. I’m not sure how that went down in 1999, but today it just sounds not so much like satire as just plain weird. There is certainly no real sense why, in a world where e-mail and texting are at least imminent, writing letters would still be a Thing.

For much of the time, Cruel Intentions is like saying “bum” in church. Sure, many protocols of what you’re supposed to say and do are broken, but the transgressions are much less dangerous than they think they are. For example, you have one teenage girl teaching another how to kiss, which is far less a rare depiction of lesbianism in film than a piece of cheap titillation, and one more sign that this film with occasional feminist pretensions was quite obviously written by a man.

Cruel Intentions is caught in the double bind that it acknowledges that people can be black and gay (and even acknowledges class – when the one Black character is rejected by racists he is offended, saying, “but I live in [insert posh area of New York here]”). At the same time, minorities are generally used as the butt of the joke – the gay characters are there to prove the unacceptability of non-straight people, and it’s not at all clear that this exclusion is seen as a bad thing.

I went into Cruel Intentions expecting to either love it or hate it, and to be honest I didn’t really feel either emotion. As a document of a certain time, it is at the very least interesting. This is not to be sniffed at. We learn much about what we are by looking at things that were loved very recently. Cruel Intentions is most definitely interesting, but is it entertaining? I’m not so sure of that. Go and watch it for what it is, but don’t expect more than that.