Barnes & Noble

Academy Award winner Geoffrey Rush deserves another gold statuette for his bravura turn as the Marquis de Sade in Quills, a provocative period drama that unfolds in an environment of madness and depravity. Rush portrays the Marquis as a tormented genius, confined in a madhouse and driven obsessively to commit his lewdest fantasies to paper. Kate Winslet, in her best role since Titanic, plays a laundress who smuggles his manuscripts to eagerly waiting printers, and Joaquin Phoenix is quietly persuasive as the progressive priest who tries to accommodate the Marquis and runs afoul of a tyrannical doctor (Michael Caine). Screenwriter Doug Wright, adapting his own play, twists historical events and characters for dramatic purposes, turning the 18th-century asylum into a charnel house of chilling perversion and casting the Marquis in a vaguely sympathetic light. Director Philip Kaufman (The Unbearable Lightness of Being) is even less ambiguous: He sees de Sade as a martyr in the crusade for freedom of expression, and his keepers as deluded or sinister agents of a repressive society. While certainly titillating in its depictions of de Sade's fevered dreams, Quills doesn’t wallow in muck for sensationalistic purposes; it has a more serious message -- one that’s conveyed with consummate skill from both sides of the camera. The DVD edition includes three separate featurettes covering the film’s production and subject, along with a full-length commentary by Wright and a gallery of stills. Ed Hulse

All Movie Guide

The Marquis de Sade was a man who liked to stir up trouble, at a time when his native France was in a state of tremendous political turmoil, and this historical drama examines how much controversy he could cause even under repressive circumstances. In the aftermath of the French Revolution, the Marquis de Sade (Geoffrey Rush) manages to narrowly escape execution during the Reign of Terror, and instead is sentenced to the Charenton Asylum for the Insane. Coulmier (Joaquin Phoenix), the priest who heads the asylum, is sympathetic to the political machinations that have put the Marquis in his care, and allows him not only to write what he pleases, but to stage theater pieces using the other patients as actors. Royer-Collard (Michael Caine), a tyrannical doctor overseeing the mental institutions of Napoleonic France, is as outraged as the emperor when he reads Justine, a scabrous volume the Marquis penned while an inmate at Charenton, and he demands that de Sade be stopped. But Royer-Collard soon learns that stopping the Marquis from writing is not so simple; when de Sade's quills and ink are taken from him, he uses wine and even his own blood to write his stories. When these options are no longer available, he dictates his work with the help of Madeline (Kate Winslet), a laundry girl working at the asylum, who is fascinated by the notorious de Sade, though she declines his frequent requests to satisfy his notorious sexual appetites. Based on the play by Doug Wright (who also penned the screenplay), Quills was directed by Philip Kaufman, who previously documented the line between eroticism and literature in Henry and June and The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Mark Deming

New York Times

The elegance of Mr. Kaufman's direction and his handling of the cast make for the kind of euphoric stylishness that has been missing from moviegoing for some time. Elvis Mitchell

Product Details

• UPC: 024543016625
• Source: 20TH CENTURY FOX
• Region Code: 1
• Aspect Ratio: Theatre Wide-Screen (1.85.1)
• Presentation: Wide Screen
• Sound: Dolby Digital Surround, Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround
• Language: English
• Subtitles: English, Español
• Time: 2:04:00
• Sales Rank: 18,580

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