Hey folks, Harry here with a look at SADE from Echoman, and from what the Echoman says... it is a pretty damn fine film. To me, making a movie about the philosophical period in the Marquis' life is very interesting, since just about every other film I've seen on him has focused on the sado-masochistic side of his life... Here's Echoman with the skinny on this French flick...
Hi, Harry!
I'm in Toronto for the Film Festival with another American. So far the staff is nice and the theatres clean. Take care.
Sade- A period piece that actually keeps your attention. French culture can be interesting, complicated and feisty. There seems to be an innate tendency floating about to tackle and present concealed and obscured truths and controversial subjects. Sade takes this forte of French culture and follows it to its extremes. For example, why would a director attempt to show the “human” side of a notorious 18th century figure (the Marquis de Sade) who has been depended on to embody all of the historically perverted past French aristocracy. Well, Benoit Jacquot answers (in French); “I have a strong tendency to do exactly the opposite of what people expect me to do.” This fills in our picture of a uniquely opposing spirit alive in French culture.
This film concentrates simply on a segment of the Marquis’s life while the Jacobins imprisoned him during the French revolution with other suspected aristocrats and culturally infamous figures. This was an incredibly wise dramatic choice because it turned the characters back on their own hypocrisy, setting a perfect stage (literally) for the Marquis (played by Daniel Auteuil) to work his magic. Where they shun the Marquis socially in the beginning, they soon find that they cannot claim exemption. One of the particularly redeeming moments of the Marquis is when he decides to direct a troop of the prisoners in a play to assert their vitality and fight the constriction of being quarantined and possibly awaiting their death.
As mentioned, the dramatic choice of portraying these aristocrats in closed quarters creates a venue for learning about how a figure such as the Marquis can actually benefit society in ways. Although the film does not bring the Marquis over to the side of moral hero, it does explain the classic dichotomy of social life where people say one thing and do another. The Marquis’s endearing philosophical theory as he explains to Emilie de Lancris (Isild Le Besco who attended the screening with the director) is that he lives to unify the mind and body pointing to his head and unabashedly to his, well… genitals.
One of the dichotomies that the film explores is that repression breeds perversion. Where some characters (including a primary player, a friend of Robespierre and lover of the mother of the Marquis’s child) struggle with their beliefs of how people should act versus how they will act the Marquis eschews this separation as much as possible. The conflict that this produces is brilliantly depicted in all its depravity by the relationships that people develop to cope with the times and quarters that they are living in.
Benoit creates controversy with this film where there was only a hint of it before. Where people take for granted that the Marquis de Sade earned his place in language with the term sadism, Benoit decides to draw our attention to the fact that no person can be simplified by one catchy term.
Whereas the Marquis is depicted as a part of the tragic beauty of a life striking out against its doomed fortune, his actions are not meant to be sanctified (religion being another one of the Marquis’s lacks.) The viewer who can deal with the tremendous emotional gymnastics that the film performs (in the name of the Marquis and others) as well as the mortality that come with the French revolution, will be reminded that one cannot lazily assume that people come in good and bad flavors. Perhaps we are not always exempt from the humanizing baggage we sometimes hold at arm’s length. I liked the films apparent goals and the courage to portray controversy. If you are not able to deal with strong sexual questions and implied sexual relations including young women you may not be able to sit for the whole film. I myself was shocked to an extent at some scenes, but perhaps mistakenly applaud films that actually try and record the limits of social acceptance. ECHOMAN....echoman....
