I have prefaced this review of Quills with a few
remarks about its subject, the Marquis de Sade. To go directly to the review
click here.
Will the "real"
Marquis de Sade please
stand up? No portrait of the most notorious philosophe in the French
Enlightenment has come down to us--surprising for an eighteenth century
aristocrat--although Max Ernst created an imaginary portrait in tribute to Sade
that has often been reproduced in lieu of a contemporary one. The sole monument of Sade's ever
having lived is the copious body of writing he left behind--several novels in
multiple volumes, plays, the dialogue Philosophy in the
Boudoir,
and a considerable body of correspondence. (The Œuvres
complètes in the edition published by J.-J. Pauvert runs to some thirty-one odd
volumes.) Otherwise, Sade might as well have
been a character out of a science fiction story, a being composed of anti-matter
who suddenly manifested himself one day in 1740 and disappeared just as abruptly
some seventy-four
years later.
I have quite
intentionally characterized Sade as a philosophe rather than as a pornographer
or even a writer, since all the evidence suggests that is how he primarily saw
himself. Sade used the pornographic genre--very much in demand during the
French Revolution--not as an end in and of itself, but as a lure to gain
an audience for his theories. Needless to say, to the extent that readers were
sexually aroused by what they read, their excitation furnished an important practical
verification of his speculations--a point not to be disdained by any
self-respecting thinker of the period. But revolution and not titillation was
the aim of the Marquis, who wanted to complete in the realm of thought what the
events 1789 had begun in the realm of politics and who inserted into Philosophy in
the Boudoir a pamphlet entitled "Frenchmen, Another Effort if You Would be
Republicans." No wonder Napoleon wanted an embarrassing
reminder of the Jacobin heyday of the Revolution like Sade locked up in a
madhouse.
Moreover, Sade in pursuing this goal
could tap into one of the most salient characteristics of the eighteenth century
social novel: its
penchant for moralizing. Readers of the works of Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson,
Oliver Goldsmith, and Henry Fielding were
accustomed to didactic digressions; Sade simply turned the convention upside
down and replaced the edifying discourses of these authors with libertine
eulogies to vice and criminality. There is hardly a one of Sade's
elaborately choreographed tableaux of debauchery that does not serve to provide
the subject for an eloquent discourse supplied by a speaker who serves as a
mouthpiece for the author's idiosyncratic blend of rigorously reasoned
materialism and equally intransigent atheism.
No
one who ventures ever so slightly into Sade's book-length works would suffer
from the delusion that the Marquis was a hedonist. The only pleasure that
interested him was that which resulted from inflicting a maximum amount of pain
on others. "Cruelty," announces Dolmancé in Philosophy in the
Boudoir, "is nothing else than human energy that civilization has not yet
corrupted: it is therefore a virtue and not a vice." In the novels, ordinary varieties of licentiousness only serve
to inflame the already volcanic passions of scélérats who find their sole
sexual gratification in reducing their objects of desire to the status of slaves
deprived of any will of their own. Partners--except those in crime--simply play
no role in Sade's scenarios.
It
is hard to imagine what image, if any, of such a figure might exist in the
collective consciousness of the American movie going public. For all I know, half the audience for
Quills in this country may be under the
impression that the protagonist is a remote ancestor of Marky Mark. Philip
Kaufman, filming a play adapted to the screen by its author, Doug Wright, has used the known circumstances of the
Marquis'
latter days--as did Peter Weiss in his famous play from the 1960s, The
Assassination and Persecution of Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the
Asylum at Charenton under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade--as a launching pad for a fabulistic reflection on intellectual and
artistic freedom of expression, making a more than ample use of poetic license
in the process.
Quills
opens stunningly, with what seems to be a dramatized incident from one of
Sade's own fictions which turns out to be the execution of a young woman on
the guillotine during the Reign of Terror. The action then skips ahead into
the Napoleonic period when the Marquis (Geoffrey Rush) has been interned at
Charenton, an insane asylum outside of Paris. Under
the relatively permissive tutelage of the young, naive Abbé Coulmier (Joaquin
Phoenix), Sade writes his pornographic novels--most of which were in fact
published in the 1790s when he was still free--and smuggles them to a
publisher on the outside through the clandestine intercession of a helpful
young washerwoman, Madeleine (Kate Winslet). However, when Justine
becomes a bestseller in the streets of the capital and the scandal is brought
to the attention of Bonaparte, the latter orders the older, hardened alienist
Dr. Royer-Collard (Michael Caine) to step in and put an end to Sade's literary
effusions.
Caught
between the unrelenting Royer-Collard and the equally insolent Sade, the Abbé
finds himself compelled to take ever more drastic steps, particularly after
the Marquis creates a public scandal by staging a lewd farce in the presence
of Royer-Collard, ridiculing the doctor and exposing his recent marriage to a
teenage girl he has dragged from a convent. When the Abbé tries
depriving Sade of quills and ink, the writer uses wine to compose a text on
his bedclothes; when the clergyman replies by stripping his cell, Sade uses
his own blood to write on his clothes. Reduced to a state of nudity after this
last ploy, the frustrated writer resolves to dictate what is supposed to be
his final creation aloud to Madeleine. However, since she is restricted from
going to his cell at night, Sade has to recite the story to an inmate in an
adjoining cell, who in turn relays it to his neighbor, etc., until it reaches
the ears of Madeleine.
Unfortunately,
this scheme goes wildly awry when an over-excited inmate who has been serving
as a link in this living chaîne signifiante torches his bedding, not
only starting a conflagration but unleashing what amounts to a revolt by the
asylum's residents. Up to this point, for
approximately its first two-thirds, Quills
has been an enjoyable and even witty
black farce--the sequence of the dictation, with the Marquis' tale becoming
progressively garbled as it is passed on from one speaker to the next, is one
of the movie's real high points. But thereafter Kaufman's film
irretrievably plunges into a pit of Gothicism more appropriate to a schlock
horror production like Brian De Palma's Dressed to Kill than to the
literate drama of ideas Quills has been engaged in fabricating.
Outraged
when Madeleine--for whom he nurses a more than charitable interest--is
brutally killed during the riot, the Abbé fantasizes violating her corpse as
it lies on a catafalque while tears of blood drip from the eyes of Christ on a
crucifix. But worse is to come when Coulmier, who holds Sade personally
responsible for this catastrophe, has the tongue of the Marquis surgically
removed to permanently silence him. In a last gesture
of defiance, Sade inscribes his farewell opus on the walls of a dungeon using
his own excrement as ink, and then dies. The end finds
Royer-Collard, who has set up a print shop in the asylum, turning a profit by
reprinting Sade's works in a deluxe edition. The Abbé, in the meantime, has
gone completely mad and occupies the Marquis' old cell, where he embarks on
writing a pornographic fiction of his own.
The moral of this story, of
course, is that in a sort of return of the Sadean repressed the villains are far more Sadean--and sadistic--than Sade
himself . Dr. Royer-Collard does not hesitate to employ what are
patently instruments of torture as a means of therapy and rapes his adolescent
spouse on her wedding night. (In one of Quill's few "happy"
moments, she takes her revenge by running off with a hunky young architect,
after a reading of Justine awakens her to the facts of life.)
Even Coulmier, who commences as a somewhat equivocally altruistic figure,
almost succumbs to the carnal charms of Madeleine and changes into a complete
ogre by the end of Quills. By contrast, the movie presents Sade himself
as a kind of Shavian advocatus diaboli who never harms a fly and is
more interested in argument for the sake of argument than putting his imagined
atrocities into practice.
In effect, Quills
is falling back upon a piece of vulgarized Freudianism that has been in vogue
since John Colton's Rain in the 1920s--and which most recently showed
up in the story about the crazy
next door neighbor in American Beauty. According
to this idea, sadism--most often in movies the institutionalized sadism of
puritanical, hypocritical authority figures such as the police or the
professional military--is the perverted expression of repressed
"natural" sexual desires. In my review of American
Beauty I have said what I think about that film's use of this
piece of moldy cheese left over from the hippie era. In the present context, I
would just make two points. First, this is an idea Sigmund Freud would hardly
ever have endorsed--at least in such a crass form. Later Freudian theory
accorded a considerable role to the importance of destructive--sado-masochistic--instincts
in the human psyche, but even before that time Freud had presented sexuality
as polymorphously perverse. From a Freudian point of view,
"natural" sexuality is no more than a narcissistically gratifying
mirage.
But Sade would even less have
endorsed such a premise. What the film wants to do is to arouse the moral
outrage of the audience at the abuse of power by Napoleon, Royer-Collard,
Coulmier and their ilk--to make viewers scream out, "J'accuse! These are
the real sadists!" However, Sade would have scorned moral outrage. From
the Marquis' point of view, anyone who had power and didn't abuse it was even
more besotted than the wretched inmates of Charenton. Nor did Sade
imagine for an instant that those in power would usually be so stupid as to
reveal their true designs. Honesty was no more of a virtue for Sade than
compassion or piety. If Sade loathed Napoleon, as he probably did, it would
have been for the emperor's kowtowing to the church and for having compromised
the state by using it for his own ends. (Very much in tune with the spirit of
the times in this regard, Sade thought that the state should be an entity of
reason, above the passions of individuals.)
For
anyone who is not distracted by the considerable liberties Quills take with its
subject, the film is highly imaginative and even quite entertaining before it
starts to resemble an adaptation of Matthew G. Lewis's The
Monk. Both
Rush and Caine give extraordinarily effective performances in their respective
roles, and even the obnoxious Joaquin Phoenix is better cast here than he was
playing Commodus
in Gladiator.
The color cinematography by Rogier Stoffers is more straightforward than
innovative, but Kaufman makes an interesting repeated use of the judas hole in
the door to the Marquis' cell, with its rectangular proportions, to frame some
of the scenes. No one is likely to get closer to the "real" Marquis de Sade as
a result of watching this movie, but in its own way Quills is making a contribution to
keeping the American cinema from turning to pablum--always more of an ever
present danger than its being inundated with sex and violence.
Home
E-mail Dave:
daveclayton@worldnet.att.net
