A parting gift. Like much of the movie, Cruel Intentions' ending is also a head-scratcher. By the final scene, Sebastian has died from being run over by a car while saving Annette , who was accidentally pushed into traffic by Ronald during a streetside confrontation conveniently coordinated by Kathryn.
By the final scene, Sebastian has died from being run over by a car while saving Annette, who was accidentally pushed into traffic by Ronald during a streetside confrontation conveniently coordinated by Kathryn. It's definitely not for tweens and young teens, but its themes of love, betrayal, manipulation, and cruelty will ring true for older teenagers. If you do decide to let your younger teen watch it, keep in mind they might need some guidance to unweave the subtleties of the story.
Actress Selma Blair says working on the romantic drama "After" was a throwback to " Cruel Intentions ". Released in , "Cruel Intentions" was about a dysfunctional family relationship between a stepbrother and stepsister. Kathryn and Sebastian, two wealthy, manipulative teenage step-siblings from Manhattan's upper-crust, conspire in Cruel Intentions, a wickedly entertaining tale of seduction and betrayal.
That makes them 17 years old. Not only was Ryan Phillippe 25 years old when he shot the film Sarah Michelle Gellar was 22 , but Selma Blair naive freshman Cecile was 27 at the time. Sarah Michelle Gellar and Ryan Phillippe's friendship made filming less awkward.
For the racier scenes she shared with Phillippe, however, Gellar was comforted by the fact that they knew each other and had worked together in I Know What You Did Last Summer two years prior. Joshua Jackson had been in a fair number of films the target audience would know fondly, but of course his big calling card was as one of the more-talented secondary leads of television's Dawson's Creek.
Among the significant cast members, Selma Blair was the only more or less complete unknown. A canny job of casting or not, that collection of people isn't precisely known for the quality of their acting - Witherspoon is probably the most talented name on that list, and she's still pretty inconsistent - so the one place we absolutely must give Kumble his due credit is that he got quite a bit out of them that was by no means guaranteed, and the passage of time has only made it clearer just how few tricks some of these people had.
Which makes it all the more impressive that Philippe and Gellar, in particular, are so damn engaging and vibrant Blair is actively bad, but that's mostly on the writing. Gellar, I'd say, has never been better, not even in her signature role as Buffy Summers: she is having an absolute blast playing the calculating, mercilless Kathryn Merteuil, a bored, hedonistic daughter of fantastic wealth in Manhattan.
Philippe plays her stepbrother Sebastian Valmont, and while the story does him dirty by asking him to start feeling real human emotions partway through the film's one misstep as an adaptation: this face turn is there in the source material, but the movie over-emphasises it, and starts foreshadowing it much too early , he's matching Gellar's oversexed boredom line-for-line in the opening, if not her great self-satisfied villainy. Both of them are going for unabashed camp, and in their different emotional registers, both are great at it: the material is being re-conceived as melodrama, but this turns out to be a very good fit for it, especially since it already looks slightly like an extremely posh soap opera.
At any rate, Gellar's hambone Machiavellian turn is so utterly fearless and showy that there really isn't a single scene of the film that she's in that isn't completely delightful. It's an indulgent performance for a film whose pleasures are largely indulgent. The plot is a simple matter of two monsters keeping them amused: Kathryn and Sebastian plot to sexually destroy the lives of young women they don't admire for whichever reason, with Kathryn hoping to ruin the reputation of Cecile Caldwell Blair , an unreasonable idiot, to get revenge on an ex-boyfriend, with Sebastian hoping to deflower activist virgin Annette Hargrove Witherspoon just to prove that he can do it.
The question of whether Les liaisons dangereuses is a social satire or just high-minded literary is, I believe, still open, and Cruel Intentions matches this aspect of its source material. Maybe not so high-minded, admittedly: a film that involves this many teenage characters albeit played by visibly non-teenage actors discussing explicit sex acts is clearly going for provocation first, titillation second or maybe the other way around , and there's not much about it that's artful at all; certainly, there's damn little that's subtle.
But for all that, there's an irreducible core of social commentary that still shines through. The idle rich are not held up for any admiration in this film: Kathryn is openly evil and proud of it, Sebastian is seemingly a literal sociopath, incapable of understanding that other people have inner lives, Cecile is an almost literally dysfunctional idiot.
Annette is the only person who's done much of anything, and she's the only character the film expect us to like at all at least until the somewhat unpersuasive shift where she encourages Sebastian to become a good man. It's not calling for revolution: it too hungrily loves the surfaces of the Manhattan upper classes for that.
But it also makes it impossible to think about those surfaces, or these beautiful young people, or the whole matter of late-'90s teen soaps, without seeing the amorality underpinning them, by exaggerating that tendency to the point of outright nihilism. It is a pitch-black, nasty-hearted movie, and it makes no attempt to moralise; but it doesn't for a moment pretend that we should like these characters, root them, or feel anything but delight when they fail.
This is maybe the nastiest bit about it: it views Kathryn and Sebastian the way they view everyone else, and makes it far too easy to completely slide into their depraved, decadent headspace. It's not a comfortable place to be, but the film sure does make it out to be disreputable fun.
Categories: exploitation films , love stories , pretty young things , teen movies , trash and melodrama , worthy adaptations. Shakespeare in Love Kumble, who also wrote the script, thought he was making a modest little indie, he told Cosmopolitan in Never seen this.
It was so dark. Dying her hair dark to distinguish herself from Buffy, Gellar gave it her all as the abominable Kathryn, someone who feels forced to act prim and prude in polite society while secretly carrying on her real life as a sex maniac and coke fiend. And, unlike Sebastian, she has actual reason to play the two-faced bitch. God forbid I exude confidence and enjoy sex.
I think her mother adored her and her father sent her amazing gifts. She just wanted more. He owes me flowers. I live at 59th and Park! So the single black character in the movie ends up villainized, just as the token couple of gay characters do. But in terms of irredeemable characters, nobody can hold a candle to Sebastian himself. Problematically compelling anti-heroes are a dime a dozen these days, but how are we ever supposed to root for Sebastian, the sexual assaulter and purveyor of revenge porn?
To be fair, it seems the audience is also supposed to believe that Sebastian has truly changed — he passes on his first opportunity to sleep with a consenting Annette, which would have won him his bet with Kathryn; instead, he tears up and leaves the room, suddenly struck by a new conscience.
Did Sebastian leave the car to her in his will sometime over the last two days? Probably not, but who cares!
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