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Quills review
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Quills

Wildly entertaining wouldn’t be the first words that pop into my mind concerning a film about the Marquis de Sade. Disturbed, borderline pornographic, nihilistic, hedonism, and anarchy – these words seem to fit de Sade much better. Yet, here we are with Quills featuring a never better Geoffrey Rush as de Sade spending his last days locked up in a mental institution.

Maybe it has something to do with the decision to reframe the image of de Sade as a symbol, a martyr for artistic freedom and freedom of expression. Moving him away from the sexually dangerous aristocrat who believed he had a god given right to kill as a mode of seeking pleasure does tend to make a more palatable character. Any way you want to examine it, Quills manages to find a way to examine him and not leave us completely shattered from the debauchery we have just witnessed.

Quills also goes about giving him a hypocritical authority figure to fight against (Michael Caine), a religious man to be his biggest supporter (Joaquin Phoenix), and a star struck laundry girl as an accomplice (Kate Winslet). Rush’s de Sade may be softer than the real one, but the film is still filled with masochism, sadism, blood, and excrement. As Caine’s authority figure presses down harder on de Sade, fighting to suppress de Sade’s works as they incite repressed feelings and desires, he strips him of his basic tools – removing ink and quills. With those gone, de Sade uses wine and his own blood, his clothing, the walls of his cell, even his own feces. Nothing will stop his indomitable will to purge the ideas and images from his head.

Caine’s puritan has more than met his match; he has met the instrument of his very undoing. And it is pretty thrilling to watch as we’re presented with two villains in our lead roles and forced to pick a side. That we begin to sympathize with de Sade is a pretty neat trick on the part of writer Doug Wright, and that we recognize the hypocrisy of Caine’s figurehead proves that this story could be taken from any time in history.

Philip Kaufman handles the material with tremendous ease. Exploring the dichotomies and similarities of the two main characters with a subtle hand and great skill, it’s not long before we realize how much joy and pleasure the puritanical figure is getting from punishing and torturing de Sade. The Marquis de Sade at least had the good taste to admit his warped ideals outright instead of masking them behind something else. Kaufman also manages to sprinkle in plenty of humorous bits, most of them concerning Winslet’s laundry girl, who is buxom and peppy in equal measures.

The biggest accomplishment is how Kaufman manages to keep the tone more absorbing and entertaining than drifting us into depression. As the film draws to a close it mounts up a large amount of tension, killing off a few major characters, and giving us a disturbing yet somehow moving scene between Phoenix and Winslet. I won’t spoil it, but it’s a trip and pretty messed up. But I think that is the great joy of the film, we’re more entranced by what’s getting away with and how it’s doing it than what it’s actually doing. It plays fast and loose with the truth, but spending two hours with Rush’s version of de Sade, all charming malice, scabrous carnality, and unbridled insanity is an oddly great way to spend some time.
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Added by JxSxPx
9 years ago on 1 April 2014 21:01