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QUILLS (Red, and proud of it)
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From its opening scene, with debonair aristocrat Marquis de Sade (Geoffrey Rush) spinning word pictures, QUILLS is a movie with a two-part message:
Every subsequent action in this film has an underlying motive of sex: fantasy is oral and healthy, reality is anal and twisted. Freud would have loved it.
We thus open in a mental institution borrowed from ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO'S NEST: the gaily oral Marquis (Randall McMurtry in a periwig) is fulfilled and sane only when venting his id ("Better to paint a fire than to start one, eh?" says a doctor in inmate art class). Against this happy madman are arrayed two men, who might have been fraternal twin brothers of Nurse Ratched, exemplifying Religion (Joaquin Phoenix as Abbé Coulmier) and Science (Michael Caine as the torturing alienist Royer-Collard). Each is, in his own way, painted ever blacker and each finally receives an emotionally castrating comeuppance.
As presented in this movie, de Sade was the tweaking Howard Stern shock jock of Napoleonic France, the point of his rants being not so much their erotica as their gleeful blasphemy, scatology, and -- dare we say it? -- Sadism. A sequence shortly after Royer-Collard's arrival demonstrates that de Sade, like Stern, enjoys the advantage of the already condemned. With nothing to lose, he can spew venom and vulgarity as weapons against enemies he knows will not hit back, a point that the abbé recognizes: "You're just a malcontent who can spell."
Written with an evident modernist gloss (and apparently playing fast and loose with de Sade's life), the movie is fascinated by the transmission of subversive ideas. The printing press and the anonymous author were the Internet and broadcast email rumor of their day, and the movie lovingly shows us how, as Richard Stallman once said, "Information wants to be free." In a beautiful sequence, words flow from de Sade's quill -- with whose phallic symbolism we are repeatedly bludgeoned, Punchinello-style -- through intermediaries and eventually into circulation as anonymous stories. I thought this was a cool retro analog of our own era's memes (viral idea expressions) that travel from host to host and replicate themselves at Internet speed via computer viruses with ideologically sexual names like the Love Bug.
Rush, who looks and acts more and more like a dinkum James Woods, is fine and convincing as he knocks over the straw men of the other characters. With the exception of his wife, every other character is lucky to achieve even a second dimension. Caine is shoehorned into a stock scientist-torturer -- our first view of him, in his own asylum, eerily echoes the bedlam shot at the end of DRESSED TO KILL, where Caine the condemned madman rises to slice his nurses. To reinforce the asylum's cold inhumanity, the film is shot in blue and gray and white to contrast with the ripely orange flesh of laundress Madeleine (Kate Winslet) and the pre-Raphaelite angelic face of Simone (Amelia Warner), Caine's virginal, fresh-from-the-convent child bride who eventually (O shock) becomes infatuated with de Sade's forbidden tales, in effect his fantasy verbal mistress.
A slow hour in, the movie throws over its linguistic froth -- talk dirty for fun -- and turns dark, darker, darkest. Caine, having collected his bride, viciously forces himself on her as his marital right. This action makes no sense either biomechanically (you'll see) or for his motivation. Instead it serves simply to prove Caine a hypocrite. This thus frees us to root for Simone to become wantonly and liberatedly unfaithful with the handsome wedge-sideburned soft core boy toy who is decorating the mansion that Caine has bought and is furnishing for her as (the movie tells us) compensation for his libidinal deficiencies. At least his wallet bulges. Meanwhile, Winslet eventually displays her architectural breasts -- does she write this into every contract? -- but the movie then adopts a curiously Puritan approach. Having roused our prurient voyeurism with endless chitchat about sex, director Philip Kaufman cold-showers it by showing only nudity that is ugly (Fellini-esque dancing naked crones and more about Geoffrey Rush's anatomy than I care to know) or revolting (necrophilic or violent couplings). This theme it then pounds to death for another fifteen minutes.
Some well made unpleasant grotesque movies you are glad you saw even though you cannot imagine ever seeing them again (THE COOK, THE THIEF, HIS WIFE AND HER LOVER). Some (PROSPERO'S BOOKS) you wish you hadn't seen the first time. QUILLS is in between. I found the information-vector reproduction and wordplay engaging for an hour. Nancy found it tedious almost from the beginning. We both wished it would end sooner and neither of us would want to see it a second time.