Ripeness is all

The Marquis de Sade has his day

By Scott Heller

*** Directed by Philip Kaufman. Written by Doug Wright. Starring Geoffrey Rush, Kate Winslet, Joaquin Phoenix, Michael Caine, Amelia Warner. A Fox Searchlight Pictures Release.

HANNIBAL AND CLARICE? Think of it as a French Provincial Silence of the Lambs, in corsets and lace.

Banned or bleeped or stickered, the shock artists of today have it easy compared to the Marquis de Sade, whose novels and essays scandalized 18th-century France. For crimes real and imagined, he spent a third of his life behind bars, dying in prison in 1814. Yet his influence lives on, stronger than ever. Check the nearest bookstore if you have any doubt: a pair of recent biographies chronicle his debauchery, a story whose outlines have become so familiar that one book can cheekily promise to put the reader At Home with the Marquis de Sade.

Sade matters today less as an artist than as an icon of artistic freedom. In these moralistic times, the provocateur who tore through the boundaries of the permissible makes a perverse poster boy. His famous novels — Justine, 120 Days of Sodom — aren’t really that famous any more. Undergraduates still get fascinated by Bataille; Pasolini has his movie-mad advocates. But who do you know who’s read the Marquis de Sade lately?

The culture wars were raging when Doug Wright’s terrific play Quills opened Off Broadway a few years back. Training one eye on contemporary debates over artistic censorship, Wright imagined Sade’s last days as a jet-black Grand Guignol comedy broadly acted and dotted with shock effects. Locked away in an asylum, the aging degenerate got all the good lines, his wit a lethal weapon against the narrow forces that conspired to silence him.

Richly appointed and ripely cast, Philip Kaufman’s screen adaptation remains audacious, if a little less timely. Opening up his chamber drama, Wright doesn’t stint on the juicy banter and malevolent monologues, making Quills a hissing cousin to Dangerous Liaisons. Yet Kaufman never finds the precise visual style that gave Stephen Frears’s decadent round robin its magnificent sheen. The new film opens brilliantly, with a bit of directorial sleight-of-hand that conflates pleasure and terror in the shadow of the guillotine. Kaufman rarely delivers on this promise, choosing too often to underline the obvious, a risky move with material so big and theatrical.

Powdered and wigged like an decrepit fop, Geoffrey Rush plays the marquis with lip-smacking relish. Even under lock and key, he lives the good life: his cell is appointed with a luscious featherbed, an ornate writing desk, and enough fancy quills to produce blasphemous accounts of mutilated wives and deflowered nuns. Although banned from publishing his incendiary prose, he smuggles out his latest provocations in the arms of admiring laundress Madeleine (Kate Winslet), who eats up every naughty word. He’d like to nibble back, but she keeps him at arm’s length. Their clandestine meetings crackle like a French Provincial Silence of the Lambs: Lecter and Clarice in corsets and lace.

Of course, the truly evil figure in Quills isn’t the writer at all. It’s the cruel Dr. Royer-Collard (Michael Caine), who’s been dispatched by Napoleon to stop Sade from writing again. Arriving with gruesome torture devices that give tough love a bad name, Royer-Collard quickly clashes with Abbé Coulmier (Joaquin Phoenix), the progressive-minded cleric who’s the asylum’s director. Until the doctor appears, the inmates pretty much do run this asylum, coming and going at will and staging crazed costume dramas to entertain the aristocracy. (These Rarat/Sade moments, implied but not staged in the play, are something of a drag.)

In cracking down on the marquis, Royer-Collard takes away his tools but not his imagination. Without quills or paper, Sade scrawls furiously on his waistcoat and later, in blood, on his own naked body. Try as he might to squelch the freethinker, Royer-Collard is doomed to fail. Language is a virus, as William Burroughs put it centuries later, and Sade’s titillating words will find their way to willing readers, even the doctor’s young wife, who hides the pages of Justine inside a more ladylike book of poetry.

Quills would be stacking the deck if it merely staged a contest between the pleasure-loving artist and the suffocating scientist. In The Unbearable Lightness of Being and Henry and June, Kaufman placed himself firmly on the side of free speech and free love. Yet Wright’s play makes the bold case that true artistic freedom is dangerous and sometimes must be welcomed at painful personal cost. Kaufman faithfully follows suit in the film’s ghoulish final reels. The tormented abbé, wrestling between the call of the spirit and Madeleine’s nearby flesh, becomes the doctor’s reluctant ally. Meanwhile, Sade’s own debauched writings get the best of him. Whispered from cell to cell, his final story brings to a boil the simmering brutality in his fellow inmates, and the innocent Madeleine pays the price.

The real Marquis de Sade requested an anonymous burial when he died, hoping that traces of his tomb and his memory would disappear with him. In neither case did he get his wish. He was buried in the cemetery of the asylum pictured in Quills. And now he’s the star of a showy Hollywood movie. Somewhere he’s laughing a bitter laugh. After all, Quills is rated R. No one under 17 can see it — unless a parent or guardian comes along.