Dangerous Liaisons" is compelling, not necessarily because of its content but because this is a Chinese movie adapted from an 18th-century French novel by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos. It has exactly zero working-class characters, not counting the occasional maid. That's an event in itself. A decade ago, Chinese artists had a terrible time telling stories that involved anyone rich, lazy or privileged — the Communist Party wouldn't allow it. As for anything that involved rich, lazy, privileged and sexual characters, pfft — forget it. As recently as 2007, copies of the novel "Shanghai Baby" were still being burned in public.
So you can't help but think things are loosening up in the People's Republic when a movie about wealthy, idle people spending most of their waking hours playing manipulative relationship games has actually been made with Beijing's blessing. Though it should be noted that the director is Korean, not Chinese: Hur Jin-ho ("April Snow"), whose reputation extends as far as Japan but hasn't quite made it across the Pacific.
The politics behind the making of the Chinese "Dangerous Liaisons" are intriguing, but let's save that and move onto the movie. To give you the short version, while this no doubt goes down in the annals of Chinese movie history as the One That Dared, it's still kind of short on the sexiness factor. Having taken risks with the material, it seems everyone decided to play it safe with the execution.