THE FINE LINE
between pleasure and pain
by Don Larsson

I have always felt there was a grim irony in the fact that when the citizens of France finally rose up and tore down that gray emblem of royal power, the Bastille, there was only a small handful of prisoners inside, among them the Marquis de Sade. As the Terror itself would become the culmination of the Revolution's dreams of enlightenment, so de Sade continues to lurk as the Enlightenment's dark side.

A bit of a hack as a writer, his contribution to modern life was to admit the inadmissible, to rouse eighteen centuries from their stony sleep and begin the long slouch back to a new Bethlehem. For the last century's avant-garde, the Marquis was a hero of libido, tapping into civilization's vexed nightmares of repression. That is why Luis Bunuel insisted that Un Chien Andalou was "a passionate call to murder," and why The 120 Days of Sodom gives a loose base to the same director's L'Age D'Or. But the fever of possibility has faded over the last eighty years or so. Bunuel's dreams of sensual and artistic liberation drooped into a Larry Flynt dirty joke. And de Sade's own image diminishes with the times.

Philip Kaufman's QUILLS is an attempt to make the world safe for de Sade by making de Sade safe for the world. The film's focus is on his years in the asylum at Charenton - the inspiration, by the way, for the great Peter Weiss play (and Peter Brook film) abbreviated Marat/Sade.

A New Age psychobabbler before his time, the Abbe Coulmier (Joaquin Phoenix) runs his madhouse on the most enlightened of principles: give the inmates license (within moderation) to pursue their fantasies, and they just might snap out of it. So the Marquis (Geoffrey Rush) gets to write and to stage his plays, so long as his work doesn't get published. It's all very entertaining for the upper crust that comes to see the plays in a time before Jerry Springer and Fox TV.

But dreams, or nightmares, have a way of getting out. The Marquis slips his writing to a buxom chambermaid (Kate Winslet), who takes the dirty books out with the dirty linens to be published in Paris for appreciative readers, as well as a few who are unappreciative, including Napoleon himself. When the Little Corporal (punishment?) - preparing to crown himself emperor, reads the works, he flies into a fit of rage and dispatches a new shrink, Dr. Royer-Collard (the ubiquitous Michael Caine) to Charenton to show the good Abbe that the mad must be Disciplined and Punished in order to ensure that Madness and Civilization cannot co-exist.

All of this is suggestive and enjoyable enough in the dialogue of ideas and themes, but it also smacks too much of its theatrical origins from screenwriter Doug Wright's play. To see the Marquis compulsively writing the body - first in ink, then blood, then excrement - is a startling image, but it's all too symbolic to really work. Rush and Phoenix both give fine performances, with the Abbe finally succumbing to his own dark dreams. But just what drove the Marquis? And why does he continue to haunt our own dreams? The film's pretense that it's all just sexual liberation will not wash, not when de Sade himself had killed, on the page and in the flesh. There's more to find here than a quill can probe.

CineScene, 2001