After two weeks of watching the machinations by which the next President of the United States was rather randomly being selected, I needed an antidote.

I pried myself away from Al Gore and Dubya Bush's dueling press conferences -- each laying pious claim to the purple robes of social virtue, respect for the will of the people, and common sense -- and went to see Quills, Doug Wright and Philip Kaufman's cinematic celebration of the Marquis de Sade. It was exactly what the doctor ordered: a soothing, comforting purgative -- a film that could not have been released at a more perfect moment.

Sade, whose name generally calls up images of sexual depravity, was indeed a sexual profligate. He was also a brilliant and uncompromising social critic whose greatest crime was that he exposed the hypocrisy of French aristocratic society -- before, during, and after the French Revolution. For his insight, integrity, and unflagging commitment to his unpopular vision of human nature (sexual and otherwise), Sade spent most of his life in confinement.

Before the revolution, Sade was convicted of abusing a chambermaid and sent to prison -- even though abusing servants was not uncommon among French aristocrats, and certainly not something a gentleman would ordinarily be sent to prison for. Sade, however, was a great social embarrassment to his mother-in-law because he wouldn't keep his sexual adventuring under wraps. Consequently, she used her social connections to arrange for Sade to be confined. After the revolution, when the Age of Reason replaced the Age of Privilege, Sade was again declared a social misfit, this time as a madman, and confined to the asylum of Charenton -- a liberal institution for those times, where the compassionate Abbé Coulmier tried to rehabilitate his insane charges rather than to simply control them. It is within the walls of Charenton that the drama of Quills is set.


There are good people and bad people in this world, as we are reminded quite pointedly, early in the film. The trick is telling them apart because, contrary to public posturing, it's not at all clear which are which. Indeed, according to the Marquis de Sade -- and apparently to Doug Wright and Philip Kaufman as well -- it is the self-proclaimed Good People, those who most adamantly deny their darker urges and natures, who are most likely to behave badly, while those who are socially condemned as immoral often display true virtue. This moral inversion lies at the heart of the Sadean world view and provides the core of both Sade's social critique and that of Quills, a delightful film that sets out unapologetically to expound on Sade's philosophy as it dramatizes his life.

For Sade, Kaufman, Wright -- and, let's be clear, for me as well -- the real moral issue staring all of us in the face is not which bible, preacher, or teacher we should consult to properly separate right from wrong. Real ethical behavior requires us to distinguish between the complex question of morality and the more simple-minded concept of rigid moralism. True ethics are founded in the muck of responsible personal choice, rather than in the rigid behavioral codes and supercilious social pretense that are more likely to be aligned with fraud and hypocrisy than with any real concern for social or personal virtue.

Sade hated nothing more than the pious moralism he knew to be a veil for cruelty and sexual hypocrisy. In his novels, it's always the paragons of society -- the priests and pious aristocrats -- who perform the most despicable acts, sexual and otherwise, from behind their sanctimonious facade. Sade knew perfectly well that the moralists who declare themselves most loudly to be defenders of righteousness are exactly the people who cause the most mischief in the world, both to people close to them and in society as a whole. He knew that those who bat their eyes sanctimoniously while they plead personal purity are most likely to be the agents not of virtue but of true vice. And he knew that those who, in the name of social propriety and superiority, deny their own vital nature, particularly their sexual nature, complete with its darker and more devilish impulses, are the people who are truly unnatural and therefore socially and sexually dangerous to themselves and others.

It must be said that Quills tends to reduce its tale of good and evil a bit too easily into its own version of a morality play. But it is refreshing to enter a world of alternative morality in which the smug glad-handing of preachers and politicians is turned on its ear, and it's easy to forgive the film its occasional oversimplifications.

Here, for once, the good people are not those who suppress their sexuality in the name of a long list of hollow social graces, but the people who honor the lustiest of their feelings and thus bestow vibrant respect and appreciation on friends and lovers alike. Here it is the natural, unpretentious acceptance of our complex sexual natures that radiates wholesome vitality -- sometimes in open flirtatiousness, sometimes in sex outside of marriage, sometimes in the enjoyment of Sade's bawdy tales. Here the reek of perversion is assigned to those who try to trim their sexual vitality to the confines of ill-designed social forms -- and to those who relegate women to pedestals of asexual self-denial.

In Quills, it is Sade, social leper extraordinaire (played with brilliant, playful wickedness by Geoffrey Rush), who treats the people around him with real respect, bringing joy and pleasure to all, even as he delights in violating every rule of social-sexual conduct that seems to stand in his way. Real cruelty is hardly the domain of this man whose name has become the legal and therapeutic term for the pathological desire to inflict pain. In Quills, real cruelty is embodied in the sanctimonious investigator, Royer-Collard (a cold, measured Michael Caine), who has been sent by Napoleon to suppress Sade's writing by whatever means necessary. (Kaufman has said that he deliberately modeled this character after Kenneth Starr.)

Sade plays lecherous seducer to his virtuous and lustful maid, Madeleine (Kate Winslet at her most winsome), but only because he can see in her flashing eyes how much she enjoys their erotic game of cat-and-mouse. Sade's lusty play with Madeleine -- and the easy-going sexual play of all Charenton's commoners -- win our hearts and our groins. By contrast, the mantle of real sexual cruelty is placed squarely across the supposedly virtuous marriage bed, where Royer-Collard forces his innocent, voluptuous bride (a succulent Amelia Warner), "young enough to be his daughter twice over," to perform her wifely duties, despite her obvious disgust.

Is there potential danger in Sade's erotic obsessiveness? Yes, of course, but Quills asserts that it is nothing more than the danger of any life fully lived, and certainly less dangerous than the perversion and hypocrisy of Royer-Collard. Indeed, Sade is less problematic than even Charenton's benevolent and well-intentioned Abbé Coulmier (Joaquin Phoenix), who must reframe his attraction to Madeleine as nothing more than the love of a "child of God" rather than acknowledge his natural and generous sexual feelings for her.

Quills is not so idyllic as to suggest that it's possible to inhabit a Sadean world of antisocial sexual sanity without suffering dire consequences. While the Marquis, powered by both brilliant creativity and manic desperation, keeps finding ways to outwit his suppressers, he's inevitably defeated by the vast social power arrayed against him. Society's twisted definitions of reality and morality will have their say; platitudes do still win elections. But Quills is not a film without hope for integrity and true virtue. Even as he's forced to endure physical limitation and ultimate capitulation, the spirit and integrity of the Divine Marquis remain as irrepressible as sex itself. Here is a man who, even at the point of death, would rather choke on Coulmier's crucifix than turn to it for hypocritical salvation.

If Quills makes its points a bit too tidily, its messages are exactly the ones we need to hear in these times of sexual and moral hypocrisy, not so unlike those of Sade. Is Sade responsible for the acts of the troubled people driven over the edge by his words, as Coulmier claims (echoing the well-worn argument that pornography is a cause of violence against women)? "You might as well blame the Bible for every poor soul who thinks he can walk on water and drowns," Sade responds. Are we as a society to regulate the worlds of sexual fantasy the same way we regulate actual sexual behavior? "Some things belong on paper," says Madeleine, "others in life. It's a blessed fool who can't tell the difference."

Regardless of which sanctimonious prig gets installed in the White House on January 20th, these are exactly the sorts of arguments we are going to have to remember in the years ahead, as free-thinking Sades run across Royer-Collards trying so hard to purge the devil from their conflicted souls.

God save us all.