Our opinion on the soft remake of “Sexe Intentions”

A more or less convincing casting for a series as boring as a rainy autumn Sunday. Above all, Sex Intentions is the illustration of a genre currently in decline.

The film has become a paragon of pop culture, a sort of iconic film that has a number of gifs shared in a WhatsApp chat. Sex Intentions (Cruel Intentionsin English), with Ryan Philippe, Reese Whiterspoon and Sarah Michelle Gellar now has its reboot, but in series, 25 years later.

After an attempt led by NBC in 2016, without success, it is Prime Video which sticks to it by reappropriating the basic material: the novel by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, published in the 18th century: Dangerous Liaisons.

In 2024, the series is set at Manchester College, near Washington DC, and not in New York like the film. And if you think you will find the same names, you will quickly fall off your folding seat. Kathryn Merteuil is now called Caroline, Annette Hargrove (played by Whiterspoon) is now Annie Grover (Savannah Lee Smith). For the character of Sebastian Valmont (Ryan Philippe in the film), he takes the surname of Lucien Belmont (Zac Burgess).

Another teenage series that gets people talking

There you have it, the presentations are made. For the story, we’re talking about a hazing affair that went wrong and threatens the university system. Sororities and fraternities are on edge, with a lump in their stomachs to see their small (sometimes unbridled) isolated evenings shattered. In the middle of this university hubbub, Caroline and Sebastian want to keep their place at the top of the pyramid. The first named even decides to put a plan in place: Sebastian must seduce the vice-president’s daughter to send her into the den of the wolf, Caroline’s sorority. Behind this scheme, it is a question of keeping their power and preserving their reputation.

Sex Intentions, in serial format, plays on nostalgia, attempts to do fan service to attract fans of the film. The song “Bitter Sweet Symphony” by The Verve plays on a loop (a sound that permeated the film), or the swimming pool scene is replayed to clearly mark the passing of the baton.

Except that once the few winks and a little smirk are gone, the sexual tension of the love triangle never takes effect. The company is even off the mark, between small excitements and disembodied sensual encounters. The drinking bouts multiply and Sex Intentions stretches. The (losing) recipe says that the story is not calibrated to accumulate several episodes.

The tone, the rhythm, the writing; everything is boring. If we have to save a little something, it comes to us from a casting that succeeds in embodying these farting brats.

Sarah Catherin Hook as Caroline. One of the only surprises of the show.Image: Amazon

We think of Zac Burgess, with the stylized mullet cut, interesting in his role as a little trashy heartthrob. The performance of the kid from Australia gives a good reason to keep your eyes on the screen for a while. Same observation for Sarah Catherine Hook, in the skin of Caroline, revealing, behind the mask of the intractable young woman, small fractures which humanize this calculating character.

Fed up with teen-drama sloppy

In the end, the show’s creators Phoebe Fisher and Sarah Goodman inject nothing fun, nothing deliciously scandalous. Worse, they get bogged down in a now mythologized (and ineffective) framework of sororities and fraternities with minor problems. The iconoclasty of teen-drama is knocked to the ground by a botched series like Sex Intentions. It’s even despair that tickles the neurons.

A certain fed up embodied through this multiplication of soulless adolescent productions, which is by far not a saving act for the genre. Sex Intentions vegetates in a cadaverous state and takes place in the (heavy) library of teen-drama harmless, vain, sickly. Let’s hope that this weariness causes an awareness in the ranks of the studios, that it will spread creative minds to restore the image of teen series (we think back to the film Virgin Suicides), a playground of multiple breaths, enchanting when the subject is well grasped.

“Sexe Intentions” can be viewed in full on Prime Video since November 21.

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