I know you don't go to the movies a lot, but Auteuil is one of my favorite actors and I thought this was a fine article. I thought Quills sucked, and I think this movie sounds quite a bit better. But even better, read the last paragraph. I've seen all the movies mentioned, and they are wonderful. And DO see The Closet- if you have already. That is an Auteuil film.
STANLEY KAUFFMANN ON FILMS
Excessive Freedom
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Post date 05.10.02 | Issue date 05.20.02
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It's a fairly safe bet that more windy verbiage has been expended on the
Marquis de Sade than on any other French author. He is close at hand to
those French critics who think that perception consists principally of turning
accepted ideas upside down, particularly if the result is cryptic. Especially
opprobrious to those critics are conventional concepts of morality. Sade
therefore is a plump subject. He anticipated them in reversals: nowhere is
accepted morality more thoroughly blasted than in Sade. French critics,
relishing this kinship, have hurried to celebrate those reversals as brave
pioneering.
Simone de Beauvoir's well-known essay "Must We Burn Sade?" is possibly
the keystone in this French critical arc de triomphe. Beauvoir closely
analyzes some of Sade's work--he poured out novels and plays and
philosophical discussions--with rigor and insight. But, like some other critics,
she is less interested in the work than in the man: his wildly hedonistic life
and his declarations about it. (He asserted, for instance, that freedom can be
attained only through excess.) He becomes a hero in reverse to Beauvoir.
Toward the end of her essay, she quotes Saint-Just: "Nothing resembles
virtue more than a great crime." (Mull that a while.) She goes on to say:
"Sade's merit lies not only in his having proclaimed aloud what everyone
admits with shame to himself, but in the fact that he did not simply resign
himself. He chose cruelty rather than indifference."
What Beauvoir omits is that Sade's "merit" involved others. He was not
alone in his moral excesses. True, like a saint seen in a distorting mirror, he
was willing to suffer for putting his beliefs into practice; but unlike the saints
in the usual calendar who suffered for their beliefs, he left a trail of victims
behind. Has anyone ever investigated what happened to the victims?
Probably not. Such an investigation would upset those French critical
niceties. Certainly--to answer Beauvoir--we must not burn Sade's work.
But does it follow that we must therefore canonize the man?
Every fictional treatment of Sade's life that I have encountered has tried to
do it, one way or another. The best that I know is Peter Weiss's
Marat/Sade, but Weiss's play is essentially political, with Sade-in-an-asylum
more sensible than the turbulent world outside. Several film-makers, too,
have dealt with Sade. The most recent attempt was Quills (2000), made
from a screenplay by Doug Wright. The essence here was Sade's effort in
Napoleon's time to continue writing while imprisoned, sometimes using his
own blood when he was denied ink. Thus, despite all his other activities,
Sade became an early champion of the ACLU.
The weakest element in that film was Geoffrey Rush's performance as Sade.
Rush simply lacked power. He had no conviction as an intricate thinker or
as a writer aboil with ideas and libido. He seemed figuratively out of breath
throughout. Now, in splendid contrast, comes Sade (Empire), in which the
strongest element is Daniel Auteuil's performance of the title role. The
masterly Auteuil does more than convince that he is everything he is said to
be: he even seems to leave behind a trace of sinister brilliance when he
leaves the screen.
The script is by Jacques Fieschi, co-author of the memorable A Heart in
Winter, and Bernard Minoret. The year is 1794, more than a decade earlier
than Quills, while the Revolution is roaring. Sade is in Saint-Lazaire prison
for political reasons and is taken with other aristocrats to another prison, a
former convent called Picpus. Here he and his fellow prisoners have to pay
for their room and board, in return for which they get better quarters and
food than in Saint-Lazaire. In this era of Robespierre's governance,
however, a guillotine is not far away, and heads continue to be lopped. Sade
escapes the tumbrel, possibly as an ironic joke by that heaven he so
thoroughly disbelieved in and excoriated, a divine cruelty to keep him alive
and abraded. Just when Robespierre is going to the finish he so prodigally
meted out to others, Sade is set free.
The center of this film is neither drama nor narrative but Sade himself.
Certainly death is always just a roll call away, but for Sade, who has no iota
of cowardice, this is only a condition, not a fate. In the course of the picture,
Sade's main activities are an encounter with a former mistress, now married
to a revolutionary, and the initiation of a teenage virgin, whom he seduces
into pleading for her seduction--which he accomplishes bizarrely, with a
splash of masochism (not sadism) for himself. Also Sade does some writing
during these months and, with the inmates, stages a tableau vivant set in a
harem that erotically portrays the joys of captivity.
But the film is the man, and the man is played by Auteuil, who once again
uses his great gifts to sustain unlikelihood. In The Widow of Saint-Pierre, to
name only the most recent instance, Auteuil played a nineteenth-century
army officer who went willingly to his death because of a compassion that
had been stirred in him. As Sade, he is so thorough, so easily thorough, that
it is tempting to call Auteuil's performance the most engaging of all the
commentaries on the man. Steady yet impassioned, thoughtful and devious,
a fervently devout atheist--all these qualities are given to him by the
screenplay. Auteuil transmutes them into a man who is credibly the source of
what he professes. Beauvoir writes: "His chief interest for us lies not in his
aberrations, but in the manner in which he assumed responsibility for them."
Auteuil's Sade is the emperor of a moral realm that happens not to
correspond with the one around him.
The virgin is played by Isild Le Besco, who is passable but less impressive
than Isabelle Huppert was as the seductee in the quasi-Sadean Going
Places (1974). The virgin's father is played unostentatiously yet with a sure
sense of aristocratic aplomb by Jean-Pierre Cassel, once the frolicking hero
of The Joker and The Five Day Lover. Benoît Jacquot, the director,
shows the comfort with period films that is not unusual among Europeans.
Postscript. The past year has brought an unusually large number of French
films, including the two Auteuil pictures above, Under the Sand, Va Savoir,
Amélie, Happenstance, and four or five others of some worth. There has
been a whiff in the film-going air of the 1960s, of the days when French films
were in the fore of a great flow of imported work. An insight into this recent
French bounty came in a report by Robin Buss that appeared in the Times
Literary Supplement in March. He was one of nine British journalists in a
total of one hundred from various countries invited to Paris for the European
Meeting of French Cinema, held in the palatial Hotel de Ville. Buss
described the films seen and the film people available for conversation in
what was "neither exactly a market nor a festival." Its real purpose was "to
show how cinema is embedded in French culture. An event like this annual
Meeting is not only designed to sell a handful of films: it is about promoting a
certain idea of France." That idea is easy to sentimentalize and exaggerate;
still the films do arrive. Vive that aspect of la France.
STANLEY KAUFFMANN is TNR's film critic. |
