Warning: Movie Spoiler Ahead!

Last night I took a break from the video gaming to watch Quills on DVD. I greatly enjoyed a couple of director Philip Kaufman's previous movies (The Unbearable Lightness of Being and Henry and June) so I was all the more disappointed in the heavy-handed, New Hollywood didacticism of this one. The movie is a speculative historical drama about the last days of famous French pornographer the Marquis de Sade as he attempts to carry on his trade while imprisoned in an insane asylum. Kate Winslet plays a laundress who smuggles his manuscripts to a publisher on the outside. I could forgive the obvious borrowings from Silence of the Lambs in the scene where the depraved, predatory genius lures the innocent young woman into his lair, but some other motifs were simply far too hackneyed. The hallowed theme is the sacred and salvific nature of unbridled self-expression, whether artistic or sexual, in conflict with the dark forces of repression. The stock villain in this case is a doctor who is sent to the asylum by Napoleon to put an end to de Sade's antics. Of course, being a moralist, he also has to be portrayed as a hypocrite, and so we are introduced to him in a particularly ham-fisted scene as calmly lecturing on the need for discipline while torturing his patients with a dungeon full of horrifying implements. He arranges a marriage with a teenaged orphan from the convent and practically rapes her on their wedding night, and later on gouges de Sade's wife for money to spruce up his mansion.

Caught between the doctor and de Sade is the priest who runs the asylum. The minute he appeared I knew there would be a scene of him flagellating himself--Romantics since Hawthorne have loved that as a symbol of the unnatural extent to which Christians will repress their natural, healthy desires. Being a priest, he is opposed to the substance of de Sade's literary output, but on the other hand he shares with de Sade the naive faith in the magical efficacy of self-expression. He runs the asylum with remarkable success by turning it into an arts-and-crafts camp. Kaufman films rosy scenes of the patients singing in the choir, performing skits, and putting their troubling thoughts on canvas. (He says to the resident pyromaniac, "See, it's better to paint fires than to set them.") Catharsis is also one of the justifications de Sade gives for his own choice of subject matter, along with the claim that his role is merely that of astute observer since everyone secretely harbors the same desires that he openly indulges. The evil doctor has already supplied the evidence for that latter thesis, but in case we are not convinced, the priest conveniently has a crisis of faith in which he realizes his suppressed desire for the laundress and, apparently, for de Sade also. Then he whips out the expected cat-o-nine-tails.

And lest any cliché be left out, at the end de Sade is turned into a Christ figure as he lies naked, arms outstretched, on the dungeon floor, a martyr to free speech. A double standard is needed to pull off this deification, however. When the doctor's young bride is transformed from a demeure, pious, faithful spouse into a sarcastic, adulterous fellatrix as a result of reading Justine, de Sade gets the credit (this change being a good thing by the movie's standards). But when an asylum inmate is inspired to commit murder by de Sade's stories, the author brushes it aside by saying "You wouldn't condemn the Bible if one of your patients tried to walk on water and drowned."

Quills, then, is just as starkly black-and-white as any 1950s TV melodrama, it's just that the chromatic values are reversed, as in a negative. On one side, the witty Marquis and his young, attractive admirers--on the other side the dour, aged prudes who oppress him.