Quills

I’m sure most people have heard of the Marquis De Sade, the French aristocrat after whom sadism was named. Quills is about the last years of his life, which he spent in an insane asylum. Although privileged as an aristocrat, there were limits even for the rich, and the Marquis had exceeded them many times over with his insatiable and deviant sexual appetite.

Quills is set about two hundred years ago in the asylum at Charenton, France. We meet the Marquis, played by Geoffrey Rush, in his sixties, locked in a rather elegant room, surrounded by books and artefacts that he has collected during his life. Befriended by a chambermaid, Madeleine, played by Kate Winslett, and a kindly priest known as Abbe Coulmier, played by Joaquin Phoenix, the Marquis is well-fed and has access to paper, ink and quills, so that he can write. It is the hope of the Abbe that expressing his insane fantasies in writing will be therapeutic and help cure his madness. Of course, this writing is never supposed to be seen by anyone else. The Marquis, although clearly a hateful pervert is, like Hannibal Lecter, charming and manipulative, and he has managed to convince Madeleine to smuggle his writing out of the building and give it to a publisher. The book is published and when even Napoleon is offended by it, a specialist, Dr. Royer-Collard, played by Michael Caine, is sent into the asylum to take matters into his own hands. The Marquis is not fazed by this; on the contrary he writes a play in the doctor’s honour, and performs it in public. The play is of course designed to humiliate the doctor, who in his own way is every bit as disgusting as the Marquis. The difference is that the doctor is a hypocrite who pretends to be a respectable man, but abuses his young wife in secret.

Although it’s considered by some to be historically inaccurate, I found Quills to be a powerful and absorbing film. I was amazed that De Sade was considered insane enough to be locked up, when many ordinary people of the time enjoyed a good execution, gathering round the basket of severed heads and taunting the next victim. Royer-Collard’s own ‘physical therapies’ were horrendous. It seems that it was acceptable to perform terrible acts of torture in the name of justice or medicine, but not in the name of pleasure. To cap it all, I noticed that De Sade’s writing was, by today’s standards, not particularly offensive, and actually quite funny.