Philip Kaufman, “Quills” (2000)
Intended as an inquiry into the extremes of sexual licentiousness and prudishness, with regard to the tolerance of societies and the freedoms they are willing to grant to those who test the boundaries of what’s acceptable and what’s not, “Quills” is a witty fictional account of the final days of the Marquis de Sade in prison during the French Revolution and its aftermath up to and including the period of the First Empire. Jailed for writing hardcore sadistic pornographic literature, the Marquis (Geoffrey Rush) continues to churn out pot-boilers which comely young laundress Madeleine (Kate Winslet) smuggles out to his publisher. The prison is located in a mental asylum run by Abbé du Coulmier (Joaquin Phoenix) who treats the inmates with kindness and compassion. The asylum is owned by Dr Royer-Collard (Michael Caine) who prefers draconian punishments bordering on torture to more enlightened methods of treatment.
De Sade continually baits the sanctimonious Royer-Collard among other members of the French political elite by writing scurrilous verse and plays. Knowing the doctor has taken an under-age girl from a convent to be his bride, the aristocrat writes a farce poking fun at him; the farce is performed by the asylum inmates in front of Royer-Collard and his young wife. Royer-Collard pressures du Coulmier to do more to subdue de Sade and the priest removes all of de Sade’s writing materials; this however prompts de Sade into even more subversive writing and the priest finally removes everything from de Sade’s cell, leaving him with nothing, not even any clothes.
In the meantime, a maid squeals on Madeleine for having helped de Sade and she is whipped on the orders of Royer-Collard. Du Coulmier decides to send her away but Madeleine begs him to reconsider and declares her love for him. Du Coulmier, conflicted by his vows of celibacy and his own sexual desires, kisses her and then turns her away. Madeleine then begs for another story from de Sade which he duly delivers through a relay team of asylum inmates; however two of them are excited by particular details of the story and cause mayhem and arson. The chaos ends in Madeleine’s death and the destruction of much of the asylum. Du Coulmier is distressed at Madeleine’s death and determines to get even with the Marquis; what he does to the Marquis overturns all the good work he had tried to do with the inmates in the asylum.
All characters are conflicted morally and ethically, and what script-writer Doug Wright intended with them is sometimes hard to tell. Royer-Collard obviously is a stand-in for those who pay lip service to conventional religious ideals, present themselves as righteous, but who are revealed by their private actions as hypocrites and violent brutes. De Sade is portrayed as a rock-star figure symbolising art’s fight for freedom of expression in a corrupt and repressive society. Du Coulmier represents enlightened religion and compassion put under severe tests from the freedom that de Sade embodies and abuses, and the strictures of state religion as exemplified by Royer-Collard. The two young women in the film, Madeleine and Simone (Amelia Warner), the wife of Royer Collard who elopes with a young architect, represent working-class and upper-class women caught up in the intellectual tug-of-war between de Sade and du Coulmier and affected by it: one woman dies as a result, the other woman perhaps faces a future of ostracism, abandonment by her lover and poverty. While the overall acting is good with fine performances from Rush, Phoenix, Winslet and Caine, with the exception of Winslet’s Madeleine, none of these characters really elicit much sympathy due in part to the burden of symbolism they carry.
The production looks realistic and can be sumptuous in parts but viewers have to remember that de Sade was a much more complex man than he is portrayed in the film. “Quills” plays hard and fast with the facts of his life; it was du Coulmier’s novel and revolutionary approaches to psychotherapy, which encouraged mental asylum inmates to express themselves through art and play-acting, rather than de Sade’s mockery of the political elites of the day, that attracted the authorities’ attention and forced him to deprive de Sade of his writing materials. In addition du Coulmier was a man in his fifties when he became de Sade’s jailer: hardly the sort of character a young Joaquin Phoenix should have been playing but then a 50-something priest falling in love with a pretty young woman and fantasising about having sex with her would have creeped out a movie audience.
I feel the problem here is that Wright tries to mould de Sade into a champion of 20th-century concerns about the role of the artist in standing up for individuality and expressive freedom in a society that would force conformity on art. Yet the real marquis was hardly an exemplar of such individuality: his writings appear not to be remarkable and if anything have been noted as banal and unoriginal; moreover, a man who grasped at 18th-century Enlightenment principles to justify and validate basically selfish, egocentric materialist urges can hardly be described as a champion of art and freedom – in another context, he would be a member of a rapacious and predatory elite using political repression to deny others what he wants for himself. The only reason de Sade is someone to be celebrated is that in the post-WWII period, fashionable French intellectuals like Simone de Beauvoir fished him out of obscurity and held him up as an example of the freest of men. But a man who wrote obsessively about sexual deviation and seemed to revel in sexual debasement could be as much a prisoner of tormented and frustrated desire as a “free spirit”.
From what I have read about de Sade also, he was not exactly a democrat and was preoccupied with his version of reality, which was somewhat Hobbesian and social Darwinist in general orientation, to be imposed on others; not at all a revolutionary figure in what were revolutionary times. De Sade’s dislike of the common people is mirrored in the introductory scene of “Quills” in which a delicate and refined noblewoman is subjected to the tender ministrations of a coarse executioner and his bloodied guillotine blade, while around them filthy crowds hoot and bay for the lady’s head which the executioner duly delivers. The film takes de Sade’s view of humanity as its starting point and more or less accepts it. No wonder du Coulmier’s attempts to humanise the treatment of mental asylum patients, combined with the movie’s portrayal of these unfortunates as basically unredeemable and recidivist, come to nought. If the makers of “Quills” were forced into an unenviable situation where they had to choose sides – either du Coulmier’s or Royer-Collard’s – most likely they would take Royer-Collard’s side, for all their shallow trumpeting about du Sade as a “free spirit”. That Wright and Kaufman choose de Sade as an emblem of artistic and intellectual struggle suggests their grasp on what such struggle really involves and is about is shakier than du Coulmier’s commitment to treating de Sade fairly or Royer-Collard’s own inconsistencies.