A virtuous young woman becomes the target of the schemes of an amoral womanizer who is in the habit of wooing women and killing their lovers and husbands in duels. When she finally succumbs to him, she discovers his true nature, and her newly awakened joy in passion turns to dust.
Costume
Lavish period dress barely containing the rot underneath.
Cinematography
Soft-focus haze makes depravity look like a perfume ad.
Director
Roger Vadim
Trivia, insights & behind the scenes
Vadim made this during his commercial decline, desperately recycling his own 'And God Created Woman' formula with diminishing returns. Kristel was already typecast as cinema's willing object.
The 'libertine destroyer' archetype here directly inherits from Laclos's 'Les Liaisons Dangereuses,' but Vadim lacks the novel's surgical moral intelligence — he just wants to film Kristel undressing.
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