Quatsch

This is a word my grandmother used as a descriptive noun, always in disgusted disapproval. I'm sure it wasn't spelled this way in the Viennese slang (or maybe even Yiddish slang, I'm not sure) of her time and place, but I like the sound of it, for conveying a certain flavor of opinion, any way it's spelled. So here goes.

I'm talking about a new film by Philip Kaufman (who also made The Unbearable Lightness of Being and Henry and June) supposedly about the Marquis de Sade, Quills. Quatsch strikes me as a much better name for this gloomy, cynical, nasty-clever chunk of heavy-handed historical distortion and over-wrought excess of style.

Ah, me. I did not like it, and if you stay with me, I will tell you why (spoilers ahead).

I went to see Quills because Geoffrey Rush plays de Sade. I loved this actor in Shine, loved him as the scruffy producer in Shakespeare in Love, loved him as the smooth assassin in Elizabeth. But as soon as he began to chew the scenery in Quills (which is pretty damn near right away) I started to feel embarrassed for him, as you can't help but feel for any a talented actor caught in the toils of something awful and unable to either free himself or save the project.

Rush's Sade just doesn't cohere into a convincing portrayal of a person. This might be a matter of bad editing, but Quills is made from a playscript that must have run less time than the movie does, so cutting is unlikely to be the culprit. I think that Rush, faced with a part that did not add up to a character, reduced it to a string of sequential moments that he could deal with one by one: lustful seductiveness, howling abuse, naive wisdom, desperate priapism, lofty idealism, mischievous childishness, etc. etc. But behind all the skills deployed by a very gifted actor, there was in fact no "there" there, and so ultimately noplace to go but into greater and greater paroxysms of diversionary fireworks. Advanced and intensifying scenery-chewing duly followed, excruciating to behold.

It's a fatal flaw, this screaming lack of coherence in the character around whom an entire film is built. I think I see the cause: the character and life presented in the film are largely wild exaggerations and outright fabrications which have been bolted onto de Sade's name in the service of apolitical idea. This is a recipe for cardboard. Not that I disagree with the message (who would: Censorship Bad, Creativity — even complex and deeply compromised Creativity — Good, albeit dangerous in the hands of morons). It's just that I don't much care for being bashed heavily over the head for hours, even with a virtuous idea.

Quills is made from a stage play by Doug Wright, and that may be another part of the problem. A play driven by message has no time for an organically developed plot (that is, a story grown from the interacting complexities of convincingly drawn characters). Instead, we get the progression of shocks the makers have laid on for us; great, if you signed on for a roller coaster ride. Not so great, if you thought you were going to see something interesting and provocative.

The actors make the best of it that they can. The liveliest performance on offer is that of Kate Winslet as the laundry lass who takes the Marquis' side and pays the price. She turns on great charm to bring us a spirited working-class girl full of sympathy, curiosity, and a taste for naughtyness that might make of her a formidable and interesting adventuress in maturity, if the film's blackly repellent vision didn't require her to be drowned by a vengeful madman, not to mention being screwed after her death by a lustful admirer (although there is some question as to whether this last indignity is intended to be read as "real" or only as a fevered imagining in the mind of the importunate gentleman).

Joaquin Phoenix plays a weakly sweet priest whose lines sounds like speech delivered by a badly briefed space alien posing as human. It doesn't matter, since he exists primarily in order to discover that his idealistic innocence only hides (even from him) his repulsive sexual depravity. Michael Caine, often photographed from below to make him look taller and more massive, rolls through the movie like a broad, black siege tower. He's great to watch until you realize that that's all there is to the role; it's as flat as a pancake (I also grew very tired of the music underscoring everything with a leaden hand — as if you couldn't tell that Caine is a bad guy just by seeing him arrive at Charenton with a man-shaped iron cage and a portable ducking stool as his luggage). The attendant spear-carriers are a standard clutch of stage-crazies, lolling and twitching in the background or the foreground, as the plot requires (by "plot," I'm afraid I mean a sort of plot by the film-makers against the main characters, who are all savaged by this hellish vision of life on earth). The film makers do try to open up the stage-setting, but we are pretty well trapped for the duration inside the cold, bluish walls of this fantasy asylum; and boy oh boy, is it tiresome in there (except for the screams, of course, if you find that sort of thing entertaining).

The characters, such as they are, come before us to act out two hours plus of the extended torture of an imprisoned pornographer by a corrupt functionary of a repressive State. A sub-plot about the evil doctor's abused wife and a young architect adds a sweeter flavor, but that's small potatoes. The Big Potato is the less-than-original perception that the immoral purveyor of fictional horrors is an innocent, compared to the official oppressor who will ruthlessly break real bodies and spirits to enforce the appearance of social decorum.

That's the set-up, and what you see is what you get: there's no relief, no resolution, no revelation. It's torture all the way down.

And lies, too; lots of lies. For the record, the real Marquis was jailed numerous times under various French governments for organizing small but nasty and dangerous orgies and forgetting his pornography published or staged. I can find no evidence that he murdered anybody in the pursuit of his peculiar pleasures, as the film states that he did (he is said to be in Charenton because the alternative would be imprisonment for murder).Throughout his adult life — after a young manhood in which he demonstrated considerable prowess as a military man — he was not pursued by a puritanical State so much as by the enmity of his highly-placed mother-in-law, who after an initial honeymoon period found him a detestable, incorrigible, and embarrassing pain in the neck, and had him locked up via lettre de cachet, meaning a note from the King saying "Lock this guy up till I tell you to let him go."

Although his confinement became somewhat stricter under Napoleon's reign, for the most part Sade lived comfortably in his various prisons, with luxuries and privileges paid for by his wife's family (as was the custom of the time when someone of sufficient rank and wealth was put away). He grew quite fat in confinement, thanks to the sweets he continually begged his wife to supply to him. He seems to have loved his wife and she, it seems, loved him (At Home With The Marquis De Sade, a book about their correspondence by Francine du Plessis Gray, has just been published demonstrating this mutual affection). Sade was not tortured. His tongue was not cut out to silence him, although years before his death he was kicked out of the Bastille (and sent to another prison) only a week or two before the Revolutionary mob attacked the place — because he had made some sort of megaphone through which he was abusing the passing populace from his cell window. The asylum at Charenton was not, so far as I can discover, burnt down, at least not during any of the Marquis' several stays. He died there peacefully in his sleep close to Christmas of 1814 at the age of 74(not a bad age for a man of that time), watched over by his faithful mistress of over two decades, Marie Quesnet (she actually had been permitted to live in a cell next door to his for some time at Charenton). Seems to me, many modern dissidents would be grateful to have it so rough.

Not the stuff of high drama — but truth to tell, I am not a fan of high drama anyway. I find the quotidian reality much more interesting than Quills' polemical theatrics, given the poignant contrast of the real Sade's feverishly prurient imagination with his troubles in a world dominated by people much more interested in money and social position than in endless kinky sex. To spice things up, the film makers seem to have used a simplified idea of Sade as the spine of a sensational fiction done in a Grand Guignol style (think Hammer horror films, but much more elegant and expensive, more stuffed with deliberately shocking moments, and add some discussion of principles).

In fact it's a brilliant idea, in the abstract — to make of de Sade's last days a tale that the Marquis himself might have penned, full of quixotic cruelties and forced "sensuality." But the result is that the viewer who sits through this film finds herself in effect experiencing something like reading a de Sade novel, complete with assaults, tortures, and murders galore. If you're not a fan of the man's writings, it's a like being served a bad, bad meal when you came for a gourmet banquet.

As for the works of de Sade himself, the real guy, it may be worth noting that they are basically unreadable to a modern fiction reader. His books, for that vast majority unfamiliar with them today, are (and I am far from alone in noting this, gentle reader) catalogs of sex acts described in more or less the tone of those instruction booklets that come with a new computer: saintly virgin into convent, nun into bondage, abbe into nun into nun into nun, etc. etc. — in endless daisy-chains of compulsive and compulsory sexual excess. Outside of their historical context the works are ridiculous, more than a little crazy, and duller (after that first titillating frisson of shock) than ditchwater. Betcha many more people have begun reading a work by the Marquis than have finished one. So making a Sadean movie, as it were, is an undertaking of dubious value from the get-go.

If I sound a bit waspish, it's because I resent being suckered out of the price of a good paperback, plus more than two hours of my life, even if it is my own fault (nobody held a gun to my head, right? I entered of my own free will, and handed over my money without objection. Had I but known...).

Does this mean that I disapprove on principle of imaginative revisionings of history? Not at all; but if you're going to play fast and loose with the past, it should be in a better cause than a thundering, ham-handed rehash of a basic Civics lesson (remember Civics? They used to teach it in school): "Sir, I disagree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."

Nor am I down on stage plays made into films, or movies devoted to historic persons of crappy ethics and arguable value to cultural history. Peter Weiss' play Marat/Sade treats the same pornographic Marquis, his obsessions, and his final stay in Charenton in a stylish, fruitful and intelligent manner well worth anyone's time. A quick net-search shows a 1967 film version of Weiss' play available on tape. If you're interested, take a look. The film of Marat/Sade is not, as I recall, as breathtaking as the original stage play was (yes, I was lucky enough to see it), but you will still be entertained by a witty, lively, provocative story (with memorable and expressive musical numbers, what's more) that deals with such issues as defining radicalism, what "anarchy" means, and what might be at the deepest root of what we have come to call "sadism."

In other words, Weiss's treatment of de Sade pays the Marquis the honor of viewing his character and ideas as worthy of serious consideration, rather than using his scandalous oeuvre as a hook on which to hang lots of high-pitched, bloody, overdone shenanigans all chained hand, foot, and neck to a thumping great Timely Message.

Marat/Sade was art. This movie isn't. By me, Quills is Quatsch.

But that is by no means all there is to be said on the subject. I recommend to your attention a review of Quills in The Chronicle Review (section 2 of The Chronicle of Higher Education) of November 10, 2000, in which a theatre professor named Steve Vineberg lauds the film as "masterly." But then, he thinks it's a comedy. "Audiences who enjoy the movie's hilarious first hour — "If he's right, the joke's on me, but it's also going to be on a lot of other folks who don't generally find torture funny. It's worth mentioning, too, that I didn't much like Kaufman's other films either. I thought they were over-rarified and pretentious, however pretty to look at.

Something else occurs to me now, though, about the work of his that I've seen. It's all about hyper-sexed men struggling with their sexuality (or just flinging themselves into it, like the Henry Miller character in Henry and June, and the de Sade character, as much as he's able, in Quills).

Could it be that I'm just feeling fed up with a steady diet of male fantasy life? Could it be? Could it? Masculine fantasy life that's constantly held up as brilliant, perceptive, deeply and broadly meaningful to "mankind," etc. etc. forever and ever without let-up? Could it be that I've had it with trivial, frippery notions of "what women want," with the wonderfully affecting but basically woman-objectifying and manipulative gaze of Kieslowski's aging judge in Red, with a limitless glut of masculine soul-searching about why penises and what men do with them are of primary importance to the whole world and everything in it, e.g. Zardoz?

I have an old friend, an author of fine SF, who told me years ago that she had simply stopped reading novels by male writers because she had had everything men have to say dinned into her for decades of absorbing fiction and film dominated by the fears of men, the dreams of men, and the doings of men, and they had nothing to say to her any more that she needed to hear. Maybe I'm feeling like that. Maybe I'm just bored to tears with more spotlighting of the difficulties men have with their apparently overwhelming sexuality as The Problem of Life.

I'm alive, and I'm a member of the majority sex, and those difficulties are not mine, except as they are forced upon me by men insisting that there are no other problems worthy of the name.

The Marquis was a sex-mad compulsive, right next door to barking mad for most of his life. Maybe I'm just not interested in the fact that he's still regarded as "important" because he wrote out his priapic compulsiveness (and possibly his counting-mania, too, in the mathematical progressions of sex-acts in his books). Maybe I'm seeing him as just another mouthy man with his brain lodged between his legs whom other men continue to find fascinating on that ground first and all others afterward (what makes Marat/Sade different and superior is that its heart is politics and psychology, not prurience and comic-book-scale villainy).

Or maybe I'm just a humorless feminist, and that's why I didn't get the giant ha-ha's that this movie by and about guys is providing to more discerning viewers. Kaufman isn't stupid, that's obvious; smart people made this movie. Maybe I'm just not smart enough to catch on to their elevated and arcane doings.

But I don't think so; and until someone can convince me otherwise, I say it's quatsch and I say the Hell with it.

--SMC
3 January 2001