‘The Seduction’ Review: A French Prequel That Gives Merteuil Her Origin Story (HBO Max)

The series The Seduction works as a kind of prequel, backstory, or youthful reimagining of the events first told in the epistolary novel Les Liaisons Dangereuses by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, published in 1782 and later adapted for the stage by Christopher Hampton before reaching the screen multiple times — most famously in Stephen Frears’s Dangerous Liaisons (1988). Created by Jean-Baptiste Delafon and directed by Jessica Palud, this new miniseries preserves the tone, settings, and aesthetic of the most celebrated version, while changing three key elements: the language (thankfully, this one is in French), the age of the protagonists (mostly in their twenties and thirties), and the sexual content, which is slightly more explicit than in previous adaptations.

Anamaria Vartolomei (Mickey 17) takes on the role of the Marquise Isabelle de Merteuil, played by Glenn Close in the 1988 film. Here, Merteuil is much younger, and the early episodes focus on the origin story of her relationship with the Vicomte Sébastien de Valmont (Vincent Lacoste here, John Malkovich in the film). Their history begins when the charming aristocrat seduces and marries Isabelle — a virgin at the time — only to cruelly abandon her immediately afterward. The whole scheme unfolds with the complacency of Madame de Rosemonde (Diane Kruger), Valmont’s aunt. Swearing revenge for what Valmont has done to her, Merteuil heads for the upper social circles of Paris, aligning herself with Rosemonde — though her new ally’s intentions may not entirely coincide with her own.

What begins as Isabelle’s attempt to get even with Valmont soon spirals into something else. Her first plan backfires, she is humiliated by the seductive Count de Gercourt (Lucas Bravo), and ends up ostracized from society. Forced by financial and social pressures to marry an aging aristocrat who departs to fight in the American War of Independence (by the time of the novel, she’s already a widow), the Marquise of Merteuil embarks on another intricate revenge plot — this time with the dubious help of Valmont, who claims to regret abandoning her and professes his love, and of Rosemonde, as she sets her sights on Gercourt.

Through these entangled games of seduction reappear several familiar figures from the novel and Frears’s film — now woven into new romantic and economic intrigues orchestrated by Merteuil and Valmont. Among them are the young and innocent Cécile de Volanges (Fantine Harduin), the teenage musician Raphaël Danceny (Samuel Kircher), and the virtuous Madame de Tourvel (Noée Abita) — roles that, in Frears’s film, were memorably played by a youthful Uma Thurman, Keanu Reeves, and Michelle Pfeiffer. Along the way, the series introduces new twists and deviations from the original plot aimed at constructing a more explicitly feminist and “empowered” reinterpretation of the classic story.

The Seduction shares both thematic and stylistic ground with other recent prestige dramas — particularly HBO’s own The Gilded Age, with which it shares a similar world of privilege, even if the settings and time periods differ. What Delafon and Palud attempt here aligns with other recent efforts to modernize and reframe canonical literary works or classic films through a feminist lens. In that sense, this French series works as an “origin story” — one that explores what might have happened to Merteuil before she became the cunning, libertine, and morally ambiguous woman immortalized in Laclos’s novel.

Palud does an impressive job of keeping what could easily have become a tangled web of aristocratic names and overlapping deceptions coherent and engaging. The characters constantly play double — even triple — games, telling one thing to some, another to others, while their true motives remain uncertain. The series also emphasizes the economic forces that drive many of their actions, including Merteuil’s own. What might appear as mere libertine games among decadent aristocrats is always shaded — as in the best classic novels — by their underlying financial and social anxieties.

This is not, however, a show that seeks a particularly modern or radical aesthetic. In fact, its most contemporary feature — at least by streaming standards — lies in its sensuality and sexual frankness, traits long associated with HBO-style programming, here rendered with a distinctly French, decadent touch. Beyond that, The Seduction adopts a more classical structure to tell the story of a young woman trying to carve out a place for herself within the pre-Revolutionary and male dominated French society that viewed women like her with suspicion.