The lighter side of Sade
Benoît Jacquot's Sade, released in Europe the same year
as Philip Kaufman's Academy Award-nominated Quills, has
finally found an American distributor. Much recent buzz and
reviews of the film contend that it offers a refreshing new
angle on the libertine and focuses on philosopher Sade, a man of
intellect and wit rather than voracious sexual appetites. Not a
bad idea, for while many literary and philosophical
investigations of the mad Marquis have celebrated his political
allegories, his challenge to religious orthodoxy and hypocrisy
and his complicated linguistic and mathematical ruses, film
treatments of the man have mostly found in him a vision of
spectacularly sadistic excess, and have been either overtly
moralizing or sophomorically prurient. Even in Quills,
which is largely sympathetic to the Marquis, Geoffrey Rush can't
help but play the icon as a fiendish and gleeful libertine.
Here, the Marquis de Sade (Daniel Auteuil) is played as a
reserved aristocrat sympathetic to the Revolution and dedicated
to his mistress Marie-Constance Quesnet (Marianne Denicourt) and
her pre-teen son Charles (Leo Le Bevillon).
The intent of the film is clear, to make Sade seem sympathetic,
to normalize him so that we can consider what his pornographic
tableaux might be getting at. Again, not a bad idea.
Unfortunately, this makes for a rather dull movie.
Sade draws attention to a number of theoretical
postulates and historical conditions that should temper any
understandings of the Marquis, and for this I generally applaud
the film. On the theoretical side, the film distinguishes
between the production of art (or pornography, if you prefer)
and the subjectivity of the artist. Not all, if any, art
reflects the personality, behavior, etc. of its creator. So,
even if the author known as the Marquis de Sade wrote sordid
tales of debauchery, cruelty, and violation, this does not mean
that the man who wrote those tales behaved similarly in his own
life. This is something neither the aristocrats nor the
republicans of Revolutionary France seemed to understand. Of
course, this is not to say that "we" understand this any better
today. Just ask Eminem.
The historical contingencies Sade that works to
illuminate are the specific political excesses of the First
Republic. Whereas Quills simplistically portrayed Sade
set against Christian orthodoxy and hypocrisy, Sade
offers a much more complicated story, where the writer resists
the mutually implicated church and state. The film further
complicates this conflict by depicting the changing relations of
the French church and state in the changeover from aristocratic
to republican rule.
The film opens with the transfer of Sade, arranged by his
devoted mistress Mdme. Quesnet (whom he calls "Sensible"), from
the Prison Saint Lazare to the privately run Couvent Picpus.
This former convent is now operated by the landowner Coignard
(Philippe Duquesne) as a cushy "prison" for aristocratic
"traitors" to the First Republic. Even after the Revolution the
rich are still rich and can save themselves from the guillotine
by paying enormous amounts of money to be incarcerated at
Picpus. It's like a Homestead Program for white-collar criminals
today.
Of course, Sade goes to great lengths to establish how in
these chaotic times, and with relations between church
officials, decadent aristocrats and upright republicans anything
but certain the one thing they could all seem to agree on was
the "evil" of the Marquis. Accordingly, Mdme. Quesnet must go to
great lengths to keep Sade in the relative safety of Picpus,
including become the mistress of Fourneir (Gregoire Colin), one
of Robespierre's (Scali Delpeyrat) top headhunters and
ideologues.
What is most politically pointed about Jacquot's film is its
critique of state power, as well as its placement of the Marquis
within what has become known as the Terror, the short life of
the First Republic under the rule of Robespierre when public
executions were quick, efficient, and daily. Because of this,
the grounds of Picpus are set to be converted into mass graves
for the executed traitors. The "jailed" aristocrats must dig
these enormous trenches and help fill them. Thus we find the
Marquis watching wagonloads of bodies and dismembered heads
arriving at the prison, and an assembly line of inmates
unloading the human remains into the ditches. Against the
violence, cruelty, and caprice of the First Republic, Sade's
obscene writings seem pretty tame indeed. Or at least I think
this was supposed to be the point (and it's a good one).
Unfortunately, the scene is handled so awkwardly that it plays
more for comic effect than political commentary.
This is the general problem with Sade. It tries hard to
make intelligent connections between the Marquis de Sade and his
(and France's) historical circumstances, but is undercut time
and again by awkward direction, not to mention a soporific pace.
While the film tries to escape the many easy clichés about the
syphilitic libertine, nonetheless, many of those clichés and
stock characters creep in everywhere. So, for instance, we have
the virginal Emilie de Lancris (Isild Le Besco), whom Sade must
inevitably seduce and then violate by proxy, through the
working-class gardener Augustin (Jalil Lespert); and the mincing
aristocrat Chevalier de Coublier (Vincent Branchet), whom Sade
must sodomize. Yet while these characters seem merely recycled
from any number of treatments of Sade, they are still preferable
to the "new angle" of Jacquot's film: the Marquis de Sade,
dedicated family man.
— 13 June 2002
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