Here a love triangle is created and it's an effective device because it shows that good (Madeleine) can be exposed to evil and remain untouched yet evil (De Sade's writings) is inherent in all men (Coulmier). Wright plays with historical fact in that Coulmier was really a four foot tall hunchback and little is known of the real Magdeleine except that she visitted the Marquis. When De Sade's quills and ink were taken away, he resorts to chicken bones and red wine and later to his own body. However, when his most notorious novel, 'Justine,' (smuggled out by laundress Madeleine (Kate Winslet) in this film) made its way into the hands of Napoleon, Antoine Royer-Collard (Michael Caine), an alienist, was sent to observe the asylum and its most notorious inmate. He had a well furnished room, dined well, put on theatrical productions and was visitted by the Abbe Coulmier. (The guillotine really was moved behind a jail when the Parisians began complaining about the smell.)ĭe Sade, who was arrested for sodomy and kidnapping before his writing landed him in trouble, spent his last years in an insane asylum because his wife's family preferred that to prison. Slowly, we realize that that man is an executioner and that we are seeing a woman at the guillotine just as De Sade is, gazing out of his prison window. As the Marquis tells the tale of a noblewoman with a taste for pain, we see that woman responding to the hands and kiss of her lover.
Kaufman startles us right at the onset of his film. The art of writing isn't the most visual one, yet Kaufman, who tackled writers before in "Henry and June," succeeds with his provoking film "Quills." Maybe its because he's chosen authors of controversial works laden with sex, but here, at least, his film works because it gets his audience thinking - does the reading of De Sade's books cause humans to behave badly or does the censorship of his work create the evil atmosphere?
0 kommentar(er)
