Quills

Rating:
Summary: Tame and simplistic compared to the play
Review: Don't get me wrong, now. "Quills" is a very good movie and very well-acted. But I doubt you'd be that impressed by it if you had seen the play first.

I saw an amateur theatre company (but a damn good one) perform "Quills" in July of 2004. The play as written kicks the intensity, violence, and humor up several notches above the film. Ironically, the screenplay for "Quills" was written by the playwright of "Quills", so it is interesting to see the variations from one medium to the other.

Rather than go on and on about each and every differece between the two, I will highlight just a couple. In the play but not in the film, the Marquis De Sade's punishments for continuing to write and incite do not stop with having his toungue cut out. In the play, after it is discovered he uses his hands to write on the walls with his own excrement, his hands and feet get cut off. The Marquis is reduced to a tongueless, extremity-less growling stump of a beast [the agonizing, painful moans by the stage actor were absolutely chilling!!!!!]. Yet the asylum's director still feels that Sade is still a "moral threat", so he has the Marquis' most private of parts cut off as well, lest the Marquis use that as his "quill" (innuendo such as that are even more prevalent in the play than the film). The asylum director thinks that if the Marquis has no "physical manifestation" of his pornographic desires, then he will be cured by default.

However, the asylum director and the young Abbe of the asylum discover yet another seemingly innoucuous story the Marquis had composed in his last capable days. The story is anything but pornographic - it is the brief tale of a young woman getting fitted for a wedding dress. But because the Asylum director is currently humiliated by the infidelity of his wife, he finds a way to "read between the lines" of the Marquis' tale and find the subtle yet (in the director's mind) obvious and grotesque pornographic message in it.

That is one of the key elements of the play that is not touched on very well in the film: Sometimes what is objectionable or deemed pornographic is subjective. There is not a single word, phrase, or idea in the wedding-dress tale that is in itself objectionable, but the director CHOSE to interpret it in the most pornographic way possible, both out of his own personal sexual frustration and in light of the well-earned reputation of the tale's author.

Therefore, the director reasons, the Marquis is still capable of engaging in his "despicable" behavior. So long as the Marquis' mind is still functioning, he can never be "cured" of his illness. So the director tells the Abbe to have the Marquis beheaded.

In the play we witness (or, rather, hear in the darkness of the theatre) each dismemberment and the beheading itself. And the Abbe's act of necrophelia -- the product of his encroaching madness -- is played out as real event on stage, but in the film it is just the Abbe's bad dream.

See what I mean? The film version of "Quills" seems almost sanitized compared to the stage version (or at least the production I saw).

So why bring all this up in a review of the "Quills" DVD?

To point out that the film, while good, has a lot of unrealized potential. While I believe none of the explicitness of the stage play is gratuitous or deliberately sensational, I do believe that it better demonstrates the essential contrast -- that the vulgarity of what one man can produce (the Marquis' stories) PALES in comparison to the vulgar atrocities launched against him (dismemberment/vivisection/execution) in the names of Science, Medicine, Religion, and Moral Cleanliness.

The fact that the Asylum director found the innocuous tale to be far and away the most vulgar and offensive of them all is key to understanding that how we choose to respond to material is perhaps more important and relevant than the material itself.

The film dances around this but never quite lands on it. Too bad, because it would have given the film a much deeper resonance.

But it might have also killed its chances at the box office. The Theatre can afford to be more eclectic, risky, and challenging than the mass-medium of Film can.