The return of the Marquis de Sade

Philip Kaufman's new "Quills" pits the Marquis de Sade against Kenneth Starr in Napoleonic drag.

By Michael Sragow

Jul 27, 2000 | In 1995, Doug Wright wrote "Quills" for the stage and won an Obie for it. It was a brainy piece of Grand Guignol about the Marquis de Sade's stay at the Charenton insane asylum. The scintillating and sanguinary movie version, directed by Philip Kaufman and due out in November, expands and puts a bloom on the play -- just as Kaufman did with Tom Wolfe's nonfiction "The Right Stuff," Milan Kundera's novel "The Unbearable Lightness of Being," the Anaos Nin journals collected as "Henry & June" and Michael Crichton's thriller "Rising Sun."

This time, Kaufman has come up with a tragicomedy of terrors that would have done Spanish director Luis Buquel proud -- yet with a muscular narrative that should win over the wide audience that Buquel never reached. "Quills" is no more a "biopic" or a period piece than was "Shakespeare in Love." Indeed, when the film opens this fall, Fox Searchlight should promote it as "Shakespeare in Love" meets "The Silence of the Lambs."

Wright centered his play on a handful of figures from history: the marquis, a wily bugger of epic proportions as well as an indefatigable writer; his friends, the insouciant laundress Madeleine Leclerc and the open-minded Abbe de Coulmier, who ran Charenton as a progressive, flexible institution; and Dr. Royer-Collard, the asylum's chief physician. The film follows Royer-Collard's cunning and vicious crackdown on the abbe's humanitarianism and Sade's creativity. But the events are largely fictional: For example, in the film Madeleine is a virgin -- but in reality the marquis paid for her sexual favors, with her mother's approval!

In the play, Wright reshaped their life stories into a Shavian burlesque outfitted with razors. And under Kaufman's guidance, his screenplay goes even further. Wright left Sade's asylum theatricals out of the play -- one assumes to stave off comparisons to the celebrated 1965 play, "Marat/Sade." It's hard to figure out why else Wright would have ignored the one time in Sade's life when the frustrated dramatist, as biographer Maurice Lever put it, "fully experienced the joy of theatrical illusion. An asylum, a makeshift stage, an audience of madmen and voyeurs, a cast of lunatics: The essence of the theater restored at last."

Freeing itself from real or imagined stage constraints, the movie deploys vivid period details to shock us into recognition. The scene of Royer-Collard's bleak wedding night with his convent-bred child bride echoes a description quoted in Lever's "Sade" of normal 18th-century nuptials: "The gentleman, all aflame, brutally asserts his rights, asks nothing, but demands a great deal." It's one of many ways that Kaufman and Wright suggest how a sex-crazed provocateur like Sade can illuminate the cruelties common even in proper society.

The film's kaleidoscopic sweep belies the material's stage and literary origins. With Wright's brilliant revision of his play, Kaufman has created a protean Gothic shocker: sensual, witty, touching and, ultimately, jolting.

Geoffrey Rush heads Kaufman's cast as the marquis, with Kate Winslet as Madeleine and Joaquin Phoenix as the super-ethical, liberal abbe, whose City of God becomes a suburb of hell when his new overseer -- Michael Caine as Royer-Collard -- tangles with him over the privileges of inmate Sade. The marquis adorns his cell with erotic toys and aristo comforts; he highhandedly directs the inmates in escapist extravaganzas that abruptly turn dead serious. But what seals his fate is his determination to write profane fantasies and smuggle them to the outside world. Royer-Collard strives to squelch Sade under the orders of Napoleon himself.

By the end, the battle between the abbe and the doctor over Sade grows to encompass questions as relevant -- no, more relevant -- than the latest Internet posting. Can art be used as therapy -- and if so, should that therapy be public? Does art fuel or simply reflect the violence of its time? And if it provokes madmen to commit diabolical acts, is it worth the cost? (This movie has the guts to pose that last question, a favorite of censors, in an insane asylum.)

Also: Who is the bigger danger to society -- Sade, the anti-sacred monster? Or the righteous hypocrite of a physician who would bring him down? And which grudge match provides the deeper and more revelatory conflict: Sade vs. the doctor, who shares with the marquis a lascivious appetite for power? Or the two of them against the liberal abbe, who tries to use sweet reason to balance their demands?

If the doctor is Kenneth Starr, the Clinton figure is the abbe, whose unconsummated love for a laundress would be as blasphemous to conservatives as our president's semi-consummated affair with an intern -- and whose tolerance for art as a mental salve can be as goading as, say, Democratic support for the NEA. But the movie doesn't let the abbe off his own peculiar hook. The villainous physician names the abbe's disease when he defines idealism as "youth's final luxury." The movie proves the doctor correct.

By the end, the abbe confronts his complicity in one death and his active role in another. When he recognizes his lust and bloodlust, his worldview shatters and re-forms. He becomes a free man -- but it's a Pyrrhic victory, with a hint that the marquis may have called the shots. Phoenix is amazing as the abbe. He displays more virile edge as a priest than he gets to do as a Sadean emperor in "Gladiator." He gives Kaufman what Jimmy Stewart gave his directors: a presence at once sensitive, harrowing and manly.

Next Page: Geoffrey Rush as the marquis: The embodiment of a skewed appetite

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