Professor David Peimer
Dangerous Liaisons: France, the Novel, and Sexual Politics
Summary
A study of the 1988 film Dangerous Liaisons directed by Stephen Frears, using film clips to show how the actors Michelle Pfeiffer, Glenn Close, and John Malkovich brought the dynamic years before the French Revolution alive.
Professor David Peimer
David Peimer is a professor of theatre and performance studies in the UK. He has taught at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, and New York University (Global Division), and was a Fulbright Scholar at Columbia University. Born in South Africa, David has won numerous awards for playwriting and directing. He has written eleven plays and directed forty in places like South Africa, New York, Brussels, London, Berlin, Zulu Kingdom, Athens, and more. His writing has been published widely and he is the editor of Armed Response: Plays from South Africa (2009) and the interactive digital book Theatre in the Camps (2012). He is on the board of the Pinter Centre in London.
Yep, he died 1803 I think. No, I’ve got the dates earlier on there. And as I said, he was a general in Napoleon’s army after the Revolution. He switched sides. I think a lot in the military could and did from being pro- King to being pro-revolution and then Napoleon afterwards.
I thought about that a lot and it’s a great question. I don’t think so. Because I keep thinking of Peter Sellers playing the Pink Panther and I keep thinking of him saying, why are we speaking English with a French accent? You know, unless you can get that accent perfect, a hint of any other accent, American, British, anything, would I think mess it up. I think they’ve tried to use their natural accents but use the body and the way of speaking, everything, to capture the era and/or imagination of the era and the characters and the aristocratic nature of it.
I think so. I think you know, when you’re caught out in the society, you’re toast ,and also part of the game is to not be caught. Part of Valmont’s revenge at the end is the release of those letters that we saw in his dying scene ‘cause that’s going to expose everything. So he gets revenge on her finally. She’s caught. Disraeli once said, what is vice to some is virtue to others and what is virtue to some is vice to others. And the trick is to know the difference between which group you belong to. I’m adapting Disraeli’s comment here, so forgive my inaccuracy, but it’s something close to that.