Quills
Originally written for SCROOMtimes.
It’s a fiction, not a moral treatise.”
It’s all very well for the Marquis de Sade to say that about his book Justine in the film “Quills,” the film itself happens to be both – and the next time someone whimpers about Hollywood never making intelligent films anymore, I’m going to have to fight down a Sadean grin when I ask if they’ve seen “Quills.” Because while the point of “Quills” revolves around morality, it manages not to preach, and provides enough fodder for two or three sides of the freedom of expression argument.
With the current furor over Eminem’s Grammy nominations, the film is particularly timely. But Eminem has nothing on Sade.
“Quills” presents a fictionalized account of the last weeks of the Marquis de Sade. The Marquis (Geoffrey Rush) has been imprisoned for most of his life for one thing and another; if it’s not his rather unpleasant habits, it’s his even more unpleasant writing. At the time of the film, he is an unabashed old lech, shut up in Charenton asylum (rather than a jail) as a result of his wife’s influence. There, he writes voraciously, composes and directs plays with his fellow inmates for a cast, flirts shamelessly with both Madeline, the laundrymaid (Kate Winslett) who smuggles his obscene writing to the outside world, and with Abb