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Attempting to evaluate QUILLS
in 200 words is like stuffing a python into a coconut shell. Quills is a complicated picture, to say the least. It fills the senses with lavish imagery and grips the mind with questions it asks without asking. It is so pregnant with meaning that its message may become too slippery to grasp for anyone who's afraid to be led to the depths of human obsessions.
Set in 18th century France, the film is about the last days of the Marquis de Sade
(Geoffrey Rush) spent at the Charenton insane asylum. Imprisoned, he continues to titillate his audience with his lascivious prose, smuggled out of the asylum by the
voluptuous laundress Madeleine (Kate Winslett) as priest-in-charge and Sade's sympathizer Abbe Coulmier (Joaquin Phoenix) looks the other way. When Napoleon gets hold of one
of Sade's pornographic and blasphemous novels, the Marquis is placed under the care of Dr. Royer-Collard (Michael Caine), a specialist who employs medieval techniques to shock
his patients out of their perversions. All the more challenged by the persecution of the heartless doctor, Sade becomes unstoppable until one of his lurid tales causes hell to
break loose in the asylum.
Quills is
definitely Oscar material. Playwright Doug Wright must have claimed artistic license to embellish Sade's story with fanciful elements to make history more appetizing than it
really is, but as far as all technical details are concerned-from the actors' tour-de-force performance down to the color of the blood dripping from the guillotine blade-it is
a superb cinematic portrayal of the final years of Comte de Donatien Alphone Francois Sade. Sade is the controversial author, philosopher, libertine and monstrous historical
figure after whom a sexual perversion, "sadism", +was named. In real life, Sade was in and out of prison for crimes ranging from debt to sexual deviancy, but his confinement
didn't keep him from publishing lewd literature he had come to be known for. Sade spent the last dozen years of his life in the Charenton insane asylum, and died there in 1814.
What merits close examination on our part as concerned Christians with a definitive role to
play in moral renewal, however, is not so much the fidelity of the film to history as the impact Quills can create upon the viewer. A movie as compelling as Quills
demands attention and reflection for the viewer to benefit from it. Otherwise, the mesmerized viewer may just miss the message behind the film's luscious imagery. More
than just a story of a sick man, Quills is a treatise on art and freedom of expression. It underscores art's need to be allowed to breathe if it must flourish; it
fights for the artist's freedom to express himself if he must be fulfilled. And yet Quills
does not present art nor freedom of expression as sacred cows. While it is true that art's grandest purpose may be to enrich the world, and that art to be effective needs to stir passion,
Quills powerfully demonstrates how art can also foster madness. Where does one draw the line between art and obsession? When does freedom of expression become an
addiction to expression? Quills shows that art has treacherous undercurrents that unbridled freedom of expression can unleash to destroy human beings. For art to
achieve its grandest purpose, it "must be subordinated to the integral development of the human person, to the good of the community and of the whole of mankind." (Gaudium et
Spes, No. 57 and following). Quills is a work of art talking about art. Whatever good it may gain for you depends on your capacity to receive it.
(Date reviewed: March 30, 2001)
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