QUILLS. - Review - movie review

Directed by Philip Kaufman

Depravity isn't a mystery, but the stuff of life for Geoffrey Rush's Marquis de Sade, locked in an asylum but abetted by Kate Winslet's virginal laundress in his dissemination of literary ultra-smut. The conflict here is between the arty pornographer who won't be censored and the church (Joaquin Phoenix's repressed abbe) and state (Michael Caine's snarling bully) who won't tolerate his filth. As indicated by the opening shot--of a rapt young beauty orgasming on the guillotine scaffold--pleasure and pain are inseparable bedfellows in this mordantly funny and wonderfully Hogarthian allegory from screenwriter Doug Wright and long-term sexual inquisitor Kaufman.

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