Did you know that Napoleon was short? It's pretty funny when a short guy is powerful because, well, I mean, don't you think that's pretty funny?

Near the beginning of Quills, we see Napoleon (Ron Cook) considering ways of suppressing the 'indecent' writings of the Marquis de Sade. He hops into the throne that is too high for him and allows his legs to dangle as he weighs the pros and cons of having the marquis put to death. The camera drops behind and beneath his throne so that we can eavesdrop on his advisors' recommendations as we see the emperor's puny legs swaying just in front of the camera.

If you're a person who thinks that Napoleon's rise to power can be explained wholly in terms of his desire to compensate for his less-than-imposing stature, then Quills is definitely the movie for you. It is a film dedicated to the single-factor analysis of personal motivation. Smart men are driven simply by the need to do whatever is forbidden them. Dumb men are driven by the need to do whatever the smart men suggest. And women are driven by the need to see other women raped and beaten. Hooray for the complexity of the human condition.

Quills begins, rather predictably, with a sternly confident male voice narrating over the sound of a panting woman. The woman pants with a mixture of trepidation and arousal. Is she enjoying herself or frightened out of her wits? Our inability to say for certain is what constitutes a rough approximation of the tension of sexuality. We see the panting woman being groped by a pair of hands whose purpose is not clear. And then a fat man wearing a black leather mask pops into view.

I can't remember ever having been young enough to perceive anything dangerous or titillating about black leather masks, but I understand that a substantial portion of the population is capable of seeing such things without laughing. Little did I know that my laughter had only just begun. As the camera zooms out, we see that the man in the mask is an executioner and that the woman he has been groping is about to be guillotined. She looks up at the blade of the guillotine and sees a huge drop of blood falling toward her. When the blood hits her in the face, she is astonished. And the abrupt shift in camera angles leads me to suspect that the audience is supposed to be astonished too. But astonished by what? The fact that drops of blood are subject to the laws of gravity? Of course the blood is going to hit her in the face. What's it supposed to do--fall up?

That moment of sham astonishment is symptomatic of everything we will see in the rest of the film. It becomes so tedious so quickly that it seems as if director Philip Kaufman dares us to walk out during a scene in which scullery maid Madelaine (Kate Winslet) is reading from one of de Sade's books to her coworkers in the asylum to which the marquis has been confined. "You shouldn't be reading this nasty stuff," protests her most self-righteous coworker. "Nobody's forcing you to listen," Madelaine retorts. The audience can't help thinking, at this point, that no one is forcing them to watch the film. So why not walk out? The only answer I can come up with is that we expect to understand our own perverse fascination with the predictable nonsense of this film by watching the characters within the film evaluate their own perverse fascination with the predictable nonsense of de Sade. Ultimately, though, the film fails to provide a satisfactory explanation for either phenomenon.

Quills is not as entirely witless as the opening twenty minutes lead us to expect, however. The dialogue (even though it is delivered by characters who have no reason to behave the way they do) ranges from good to crackling. I was pleased by such lines as the following:

"Idealism is youth's final luxury."

"Playing dress-up with cretins sounds like a symptom of madness--not a cure."

"That's terrible. That's too too terrible. Well, go on!"

"You're not the anti-Christ; you're just a malcontent who knows how to spell."

But however satisfactorily Quills handles language, it does an abysmal job of handling ideas. It very clumsily and repeatedly attempts to examine the question of whether violence in art functions as a catharsis or as a stimulus toward violence. "I imagine myself to be all of his [de Sade's] characters," explains Madelaine. "If I wasn't such a bad woman on the page, I couldn't be such a good woman in life."

And she is a 'good' woman--at least by certain estimates. She dies a virgin, and the priest (Joaquin Phoenix) who dared not act on his love for her in life dreams of taking her virginity in death. His necrophilic impulses are irresistible in his dreams, and he is not a fan of the marquis' writing. The lesson here appears to be that if we don't want to hump our own mattresses while pretending that they are dead women, we should expose ourselves to pornography.

But the other side of the argument is that when simpletons are exposed to perversity, they are driven to enact that perversity. As the marquis whispers one of his final tales to Madelaine through a chain of inmates, he drives the most Beavis-like link in the chain to set his own cell on fire and the one who passes the message directly to Madelaine to kill her. It's hard to say whether the lesson here is that the free exchange of ideas promotes violence or whether our inability to keep idiots from participating in that exchange is the culprit. So if we want to discover the film's final position on this subject, perhaps we should look at our villain, Dr. Royer-Collard (Michael Caine).

The good doctor insists that the best way to control the deranged is by torturing them. He certainly doesn't think that the marquis' practice of attempting to purge his perversity by writing about it is the solution to his problems. He proves his point by allowing Madelaine to be killed instead of rescuing her from the brute whose murderous lust has been incited (for the second time in the film) by de Sade's words. Get it? The true sicko is the one who tries to censor the Marquis de Sade.

The film puts the same idea a different way after the priest is required to oversee the removal of the marquis' tongue. Deprived of quills to write with and a tongue to speak with, the marquis is now supposedly silenced. But the priest first closes the door on the inarticulate screaming of the marquis and then slams his head against it repeatedly. Get it? Trying to silence ideas is like beating your head against a wall.

Even though Dr. Royer-Collard's guilt in the matter of Madelaine's death is never discovered, he gets the just desserts of a man who tries to exert too strenuous a control over the people around him. Despite his attempts to prevent the marquis' words from reaching the world, his own wife becomes an avid reader of de Sade. After she depletes his fortune redecorating their chateau, she absconds with the architect and leaves a copy of de Sade's Justine on her bed.

So here's the moral as nearly as I can make it out: No matter how urgently we try to suppress them, ideas will always refuse to be contained. A chaste priest can prevent himself from succumbing to his lust while he is awake, but he simply can't help having an occasional necrophilic dream. The stuff that we are always trying to push down beneath the surface will always force its way back into plain view. Etc., etc., ad infinitum, ad nauseum.

Mr. Kaufman, the next time you decide to lecture me for two hours, could you please at least try to tell me something I don't know?


Recommended: No