Imagine the shotgun marriage of Choderlos De Laclos and Jacqueline Susann, and you'll get an idea of the shameless appeal of Dangerous Beauty, a soft-focus period romance with surprising wit. As its feisty protagonist, Catherine McCormack (Braveheart) has the blandly glamorous features of a thousand supine paperback heroines. She stars as an educated young poetess in 1583 Venice who falls in love with a dashing playboy (Rufus Sewell), but lacks the sizable dowry needed to marry him. Her choices are limited: Join a convent and face the indignity of a bad haircut, or take up the family tradition and become a courtesan. With little hesitation, she settles on the latter, and, in Dangerous Beauty's funniest sequence, her mother (Jacqueline Bisset) leads her through a crash course on seduction, deep-throating stalks of asparagus and revealing the surprising functions of the male organ. It's no coincidence that when the dark forces of the plague and the Inquisition threaten the decadent city, the film also loses its chintzy luster; like any good courtesan, it's far more stimulating when giving pleasure than denying it. Anyway, you'd be a fool to walk into a movie called Dangerous Beauty expecting feminist motifs and searing moral drama over horseback rides and gondolas. Taken on a camp level, there's a lot of fun to be had here, even if the movie may actually take itself seriously.