Life mirrors art, and art mirrors life, and both life and art have a one-track mind, and that track is set on sex and euphemisms for sex in the drama "Quills."
The Marquis de Sade (Geoffrey Rush), thus, cannot be incarcerated for that which is, for him, inevitable: perversion in the first degree. Instead, the Marquis, living and writing in a profoundly overripe register, has been institutionalized under the care of the Abb Coulmier (Joaquin Pheonix).
Living decadently in an otherwise Gothic asylum (the sets and costumes work wonderfully in their playful realism), when not overcome by a swooning narcissistic eroticism, the Marquis deflowers, by use of his quills, page after virgin manuscript page with an "encyclopedia of perversions," a Hustler's Roget's panoply of porn, smut, lewdness and excess.
But it's good stuff, and once smuggled back out with the buxom complicity of the laundress Madeleine (Kate Winslet), his work sells like Danielle Steel's latest harlequin pulp, only to an audience that includes Napoleon.
When Napoleon, after listening not so reluctantly to de Sade's "Juliette," demands that something must be done to stop the dissemination of this filth, he sends Dr. Royer-Collard (Michael Caine) to the sanitarium and orders all de Sade's works burned.
Expertly cast as the believer in science against Pheonix's believer in God, and the public prude against the Marquis' public exhibitionist, the doctor's private life becomes increasingly more like the Marquis', except that we have sympathy for the latter and disgust for the former.
The Marquis writes against the pains taken to stop him by everyone else except Madeleine, who maybe loves him. His need to put pen to paper is pathological -- he resists going completely crazy only by spewing forth unctuous and highly clever titterings. He is perhaps no weirder than his fellow inmates -- firebugs, mutes, generic obsessive-compulsives. He is afflicted with a disease; a disease requiring of him disquisition on the basest, and most basic, human desires and facts.
Pheonix, who plays one of the most convincing, human, legitimately vulnerable men of the cloth I've seen in film, has quite a handful dealing with the Marquis.
Once he has encountered Winslet, he's thrown into palpable self-doubt, as was St. Augustine, reconciling a desire for a handful of her with his firmly held vows of chastity. He must contain himself, just as he must contain the Marquis, containment through oath or white linen or bars. The doctor threatens closure of his asylum; neither the Marquis nor Madeleine help keep it open. Pheonix wallows, persuasively, in penitence and hope.
Director Philip Kaufman has made one of the great films of 2000 with "Quills." Consistently strong acting, a paucity of sentimentality and moral judgement, even of didacticism, the film reinvigorates discussion about free speech, love and literature.
This coherently and strongly photographed film, full of subtle symbolism (water, fire, stone, red, white), shares much with "Shakespeare in Love" with its wise and substantive dialogue (laterally, with a Hamletian play within a play) and historical and contemporary relevance.
The Marquis' oeuvre (including "The Crimes of Love," "120 Days of Sodom," "Adelaide of Brunswick," and other stories about les belles jeunes filles) may not persevere as literature as Stendhal's or Balzac's will, but his biography and influence cannot be ignored without blushing.
The Marquis engages himself in a furiously intelligent pas de deux about the merits of writing. Sometimes the interchanges bite off more than they can chew. But that might be the point -- overabundance, effusiveness and largesse.
"Chocolat," the trailer to which shows Madame Binoche morphed into a layer-cake of Betty Crocker, Martha Stewart and a middling sitcom star, reeks of decadence of a sickly-sweet, "3 Musketeers" grade.
"Quills" swells with the best kind of decadence -- the kind that starts out guiltily but then makes one honest enough to say: "Life is like that, and, hey, if that's how it's going to be, let's proclaim it and bring on some more!"
