+3
Just saw Quills after seeing it up pretty high on the MoFo's top 100 list. Shouldn't be there, IMO.
My general reaction went from ecstatic to facepalm to impressed to utter meh. It could have been something much more than it was, but the script made some wrong turns early on and nothing felt like it clicked. Its main "technical" problems were really muddled and messy editing and character developments. Not quite surreal enough to merit any kind of narrative leeway. I promised I wouldn't criticize a misrepresentation of Sade, but I did find his character to be very disappointing in the usual ultra-reductionist Hollywood portrait of an artist or any historical figure. In the film: he was a manic writer, apparently. Someone who "had" to write. Also, he was a manic pervert who could only subvert his perversion through writing. Okay, I get it. But this is such a ridiculous simplification of his reasons, which, at least how I have understood it, were mostly intellectual. Let's be real here. Sade was not even a Bataille. He was no artist, and the scenes of the girl being "moved" by his "bootiful" writing is ridiculous. If you read or skim 120 Days of Sodom it is anything but perverse. It's almost mechanical like a set of pre-subscribed iterations through any number of "perverse" acts, at least in themselves as such. I have no doubt Sade was pervert, but his writing was more. It was, and this is up for debate, an attempt to oppose the Kantian ethics of never allowing the pain of the other to be ignored. What Sade does is make pain a duty, something which seems much more attributed to Michael Caine's character, who is probably one of the most poorly developed and inconsistent characters (in the sense that his inconsistencies are neither eccentricities nor incited shifts in character like Pheonix's character, for instance). Essentially, Sade realized that by making pleasure and pain a duty, the responsibility of the author of both are derealized and attributed to the pursuit of the duty. There is a precise academic exercise going on here, not a compulsion derived from some innately perverse character. Sade was studying the limits pain and pleasure, not good and evil. This is not to say that he did not embody a moral struggle, but the presentation of it borders on caricature. I saw no truths emerge from the uniqueness of Sade's "extreme" nature, only the insane ramblings of a pervert. As for the "cool" bits where Sade develops more and more personal, direct ways of "writing", I thought their progression was very successful and fun to witness. Not a bad film; just missed out on a lot of opportunities for depth, and much of what the characters did or acted like didn't make any sense.
7.5/10
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Last edited by planet news; 08-10-10 at 11:20 PM.