Father Geek received the following review of the new Marquis de Sade flick this morning and it doesn't appear to have washed with Moll, the lass who sent it in...
Be forewarned this is SPOILER rich stuff...
QUILLS
Geoffrey Rush ... Marquis de Sade
Kate Winslet ... Madeleine Le Clerc
Joaquin Phoenix ... Abbe de Coulmier
Michael Caine ... Doctor Royer-Collard
This review is based on the assumption that you are vaguely familiar with the perverse, sadistic, erotic, violent writings of the Marquis de Sade, or are at least aware of his reputation of ill-repute.
The movie opens with an upper-body shot of a young maiden seemingly in a state of sexual abandonment ... until the hands of an executioner clasp her neck, forcing it down onto the cutting block of the guillotine -- sounds dramatic and could have worked but didn't, instead a ripple of giggling eminated from the movie audience ... not a good start. Kate Winslet plays MADELEINE, a laundry woman working in the insane asylum in which the Marquis de Sade (Rush) is interred (her mother also works there). The Marquis has struck a deal with Napolean's advisors (who are aware that his execution would drastically increase the sales of his books), that rather than being put to death he must live out his days in an insane asylum, albeit furnished with all the comforts to which he is accustomed.
Phoenix plays the priest in charge of the asylum, whose methods are to rehabilitate the insane through art, music, theater, etc. He allows the Marquis to write as much as he wants in order to 'purge himself of his impurities' in an effort to save his soul.
Secretly however, Madeleine is smuggling the Marquis' writings out in the dirty laundry linens, and the Marquis is thus able to publish his novel, 'Juliette.' This infuriates Napolean and he appoints a doctor (Caine) to oversee the priests work. The doctor's methods of curing mental instability are somewhat more torturous than the priests, to say the least. Thus the confusing muddle of antagonistic relationships ensue: between the doctor and the Marquis, the priest and the Marquis, the Doctor and the Priest, the Priest and Madeleine, etc, etc. The Marquis is in charge of staging a play that the inmates perform before a public audience -- he uses this opportunity to ridicule the doctor and his new, very young, virginal bride (played by a young woman who could not act her way out of a paper bag). The doctor's wife eventually leaves him to pursue her lustful relationship with a younger man, having been sexually liberated after reading the Marquis' book.
As the Marquis finds ways to anger the doctor, the priest is forced to punish him further: he takes away his writing implements so the Marquis writes on his bedclothes using red wine and a chicken drumstick; the priest then empties the Marquis' cell of all its luxuries, so the Marquis cuts himself with shards of glass and uses his own blood to write all over his clothing; the priest then forces him to strip naked in one of the few great scenes of the movie and ultimately, the Marquis uses his own faeces to write on the wall of his dungeon cell.
Meanwhile ... Madeleine has fallen in love with the priest, whose sacred vows of chastity prevent him from consummating the relationship. Their feelings for one another are not always clear, and there is the most ridiculous scene where Madeleine is being whipped (a punishment ordered by the doctor for smuggling the Maquis' writings to his publisher), and so the priest tears off his robes and offers to be whipped in her place (yawn) (more giggles) Madeleine and the priest's relationship is sometimes reminiscent of the super-cheese eighties miniseries THE THORNBIRDS with Richard Chamberlein as the self-sacrificing messenger of god.
To the crunch: In the final hoo-ha, the Marquis hatches a plan whereby the final story he is to tell Madeleine will be relayed from his cell to the laundry room (where she sits waiting to transcribe it), via the inmates of the other cells. Each lunatic has a hole in the wall of their cell through which a sadistic tale is told from madman to madman, like a game of "chinese whispers".
Alas, all goes awry when one of them, a pyromaniac, gets hold of his neighbour's candle and proceeds to set the place on fire. Chaos ensues, enabling another crazy (who is obsessed with Madeleine), to crash through into the laundry room, cut out her tongue, and stab her to death. His actions mirror the story that the Marquis has just told them.
The priest is devastated, and from this sad state of affairs comes the best scene of the film: the priest has a necrophiliac dream in which Madeleine and he are making love on the altar of a Catholic church, while the image of Christ crucified looks on. Very cool.
The ending is one of 'false horizons,' the kind where just when you think it's all over ... it's not! and it's long and boring and frustrating. Goes something like this: The priest and the Marquis de Sade have a showdown in which the priest forces the marquis to admit that he was actually in love with Madeleine; The priest cuts off the Marquis' tongue to revenge Madeleine's death; as the Marquis is dying, the priest attempts to read him his last rights and holds a crucifix up for the Marquis to kiss -- the Marquis ends up swallowing it.
Cut to: The doctor is showing a priest around the asylum -- this is to be the new priest in charge. They go to the Marquis' old cell and therein lies the priest, dirty and bedraggled, pushed over the edge by the Marquis' final rejection of salvation. He is begging for quills, something to write with, anything. The doctor and the new priest slowly walk away.
The laundry trap opens and it is Madeleine's mother, passing him paper and quills. But rather than write a letter to the world in an attempt to regain his own liberty, the priest begins to write sexual/sadistic/violent material in the manner of the Marquis de Sade. The acting of the lead players was on the whole excellent, as to be expected. Unfortunately the film tries to do too much, rather than focusing on moments that could have been breathtakingly powerful, but inevitably end up few and far between. Alas, for a story that is based on the life and perverted times of the Marquis de Sade, the film lacks anything vaguely resembling erotic manifestations, and the depth of the characters fails to reveal any long-lasting poignancy. Worst of all is that the director, Philip Kaufman, almost ignores the fact that Kate Winslet is one of the most sensual, erotic actresses to grace the contemporary cinematic screen. He fails to put her talents to use ... and in a movie about the Marquis de Sade! If you don't see it here then where?
Kaufman has attempted to make the movie big-budget-hollywood while also trying to make it artsy-fartsy-deep-and-dark. Unfortunately, the way of the worl insists that one must choose one or the other and this is where QUILLS fails miserably. Not a psychologically disturbing thought lingers for as long as the credits roll...
Moll F.
