QUILLS

 More ambitious than successful, "Quills" hasn't quite stood the test of time. If you want de Sade you really need to go to Pasolini and if you want the Asylum of Charenton you should stick with Peter Brook. To be fair to Philip Kaufman, "Quills" at least went as far as mainstream cinema might have gone in 2000 and it did pick up 3 Oscar nominations, (including one for Geoffrey Rush's Marquis), as well as several other prizes but it's hardly a manifesto for free speech, liberty or even carnality sometimes coming across like a Carry On movie with the cheap laughs removed.

On the plus side it is splendidly designed and well acted with Rush giving us a de Sade more sinned against than sinning making Michael Caine's 'doctor' the film's real sadist and there's nice work from both Kate Winslet as the laundress with a mind of her own and Joaquin Phoenix as the young priest whose good intentions backfire on him. Doug Wright's script, taken from his own play, aims for the literate but he can't quite escape the fact that he's written a horror film complete with the requisite amount of torture-porn, an obligatory dash of necrophilia and a touch of blasphemy . By the time we get around to the Marquis' final declaration, written in feces on the walls of his cell, the film has nowhere to go but down.