“Welcome to the delicious hell that is high society,” beckons the trailer for “The Seduction,” HBO Max's steamy new French-language drama inspired by “Dangerous Liaisons.”

And indeed, when most of us last saw the Marquise Isabelle de Merteuil, she was in her own private hell, wiping white powder off her tear-stained face. This 18th-century Parisian socialite, memorably played by Glenn Close in the 1988 Stephen Frears movie, was ruined every which way — schemes exposed, reputation in tatters, shamed and booed at the opera.

Well, “The Seduction” has something to say about her story — or at least, her backstory. The latest adaptation of the 1782 epistolary novel by Choderlos de Laclos, somewhere between a prequel and a remake, retains much of the main story but takes a radical detour in

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