Guy de Maupassant’s novel Bel Ami has been adapted for the stage and screen multiple times—most memorably in 1947, in a movie starring George Sanders and Angela Lansbury. The novel’s appeal is obvious: It explores the social strata of 19th-century Paris by showing an ambitious scoundrel hopping from bed to bed. But given the era when the book was written, and given when its best-known adaptations were made, most Bel Amis have had to imply a lot, being coy about what’s really happening in those private chambers. So for the new adaptation, directors Declan Donnellan and Nick Ormerod and screenwriter Rachel Bennette try to take more advantage of the freedoms of modern cinema, making sure that their Bel Ami has plenty of sex and straight talk. The result is almost a test case for whether explicitness is a virtue.
