Usually the dumbest thing a director can do is change the setting of a classic story in an attempt to be hip: moving “Romeo and Juliet” to space, or “MacBeth” to Vietnam. But by transplanting Choderlos de Laclos’s amoral novel about pre-Revolutionary France, “Les Liaisons Dangereuses,” to 18th-century Korea, director E J-Yong creates a luscious period drama that feels alive, not dusty and dry.

Jo-Weon (Bae Yong-Jun) is a scholar and man of leisure who spends his life unwrapping women and gobbling them up like candy. He has an unfulfilled yen to crawl up the hanbok of his older cousin, Lady Jo (Lee Mi-Suk). She offers him her body on one condition: Her husband is bringing in a new concubine; if Jo-Weon can seduce and ruin this teenaged piece of fluff, he’ll gain full access.

Jo-Weon dismisses this as something he can knock off in an afternoon. To him, the more interesting challenge is to debauch chaste Lady Jeong (Jeon Do-Yeon). Not only is her chastity legendary (she’s remained faithful to her dead husband for more than nine years), she’s a Catholic to boot. Lady Jo realizes this will probably end disastrously for both parties, and so readily agrees to that challenge.

The game is on, and the rest of the movie follows the plot of the novel fairly closely – much more closely, in fact, than the Stephen Frears version, starring John Malkovich and Glenn Close, that will be most Americans’ point of comparison.

As Lady Jo, Lee Mi-Suk wields her arched eyebrows like whips, and though Jeon Do-Yeon as Lady Jeong starts out too prim, her portrayal of the character’s moral destruction achieves a transcendent bleakness. Bae Yong-Jun is a wildly popular television actor in his first movie role, and he silkily underplays Jo-Weon, coming across as much less a malignant reptile than Mr. Malkovich did.

Shot through with mordant wit and (surprisingly) set to Baroque music, “Untold Scandal” was an enormous hit in Korea, setting the record for the largest opening weekend ever. It’s also a sign that de Laclos’s novel is capable of transcending culture without losing any of its delicious salaciousness.