As our republic turns to an Empire under another mad King George, it is interesting to see in another time the responses of power-mad people who are sex obsessed and repressed to a libertine.
For the first time, I began to understand 'why Napoleon'? As we see the French aristocrats in their maggot-laden prison (evoking the maggot-laden aristocracy and their excesses?), we come to view the soon-to-be headless from another perspective. As far as I'm concerned, deSade is merely an excuse for showing us how it is to face death daily. These people because of their wealth could afford to pay to live in this 'asylum'. Most assuredly, seeing the headless, former friends of yours dumped into ditches outside your 'chateau' would drive you mad....knowing your own fate lay mere feet away. The guillotine, also erected nearby provided yet another view. In order to inject a little humor in what otherwise is unbearable (how many of you remembered the photographs at Auschwitz when you saw the ditches filled with the bodies?), we see the French peasants on burial detail throwing the heads from one to another. We are then told by a young man, obsessed with watching the daily parade of tumbrels to the burial ditches (formerly gardens-- growing vegetables that you watch uprooted....what pictorial analogies!!!) that "They are wedging the heads into the bodies." Scuse me for pulling a Henry James on you.
Autiell is indeed magnificent. Having just seen "The Widow" where he plays a sheriff about to USE the visiting guillotine on a good man, I thought the role-reversal was a great perspective for him. As Sade, he too faces the blade: as Ropespierre, in his obsession to force belief in a diety on the French, is trying to execute de Sade as an example of a 'godless atheist'. (Can you be an atheist without being godless? Seeming redundancies fascinate me.) I could not hear this announcement without thinking of our clear disregard for the Constitutional separation of church and state in our 'under God' interruption of the nice cadences of the Pledge of Allegiance. I'm old enough to have learned the Pledge when it wasn't hampered with a reminder of our careless disregard of the Bill of Rights.
Of course, there's a sex scene. Which raises the question, "Is it men who get turned on by violence?" To me, it was repulsive. Being introduced to sex by a gang bang would have made me frigid, I'm thinking. Yet, as Auteill tastefully points out to the young man whom he has just had whip him, "You're hard; that's good." Is that why men like violent movies? And is that why they can, with logic-tight compartments in place, cry out against movies with sex scenes while loving an Arnold Schwarzenburger 'kill-all with loud guns and lots of blood' fest? They have been sexually satiated with the violence, so need no 'cissy love-with-sex' scenes? The idea that adultery is worse than mass and/or state-sanctioned mass murder by my country-men still astounds me!! But maybe, this is a partial explanation.
Sade is aging, and it would have been more convincing for the maiden's introduction to sex, had Auteill not been so sexy and full of chemistry himself, as it oozes out of the screen, as though we had the ability to pump phenomes through the air!!! Museum of Fine Arts in Boston has a great auditorium (where I saw this film), but it ain't there yet!! See 'Quills', see 'Marat/Sade' and see this. All different viewpoints of a very complex point in French and world history.
For the first time, I began to understand 'why Napoleon'? As we see the French aristocrats in their maggot-laden prison (evoking the maggot-laden aristocracy and their excesses?), we come to view the soon-to-be headless from another perspective. As far as I'm concerned, deSade is merely an excuse for showing us how it is to face death daily. These people because of their wealth could afford to pay to live in this 'asylum'. Most assuredly, seeing the headless, former friends of yours dumped into ditches outside your 'chateau' would drive you mad....knowing your own fate lay mere feet away. The guillotine, also erected nearby provided yet another view. In order to inject a little humor in what otherwise is unbearable (how many of you remembered the photographs at Auschwitz when you saw the ditches filled with the bodies?), we see the French peasants on burial detail throwing the heads from one to another. We are then told by a young man, obsessed with watching the daily parade of tumbrels to the burial ditches (formerly gardens-- growing vegetables that you watch uprooted....what pictorial analogies!!!) that "They are wedging the heads into the bodies." Scuse me for pulling a Henry James on you.
Autiell is indeed magnificent. Having just seen "The Widow" where he plays a sheriff about to USE the visiting guillotine on a good man, I thought the role-reversal was a great perspective for him. As Sade, he too faces the blade: as Ropespierre, in his obsession to force belief in a diety on the French, is trying to execute de Sade as an example of a 'godless atheist'. (Can you be an atheist without being godless? Seeming redundancies fascinate me.) I could not hear this announcement without thinking of our clear disregard for the Constitutional separation of church and state in our 'under God' interruption of the nice cadences of the Pledge of Allegiance. I'm old enough to have learned the Pledge when it wasn't hampered with a reminder of our careless disregard of the Bill of Rights.
Of course, there's a sex scene. Which raises the question, "Is it men who get turned on by violence?" To me, it was repulsive. Being introduced to sex by a gang bang would have made me frigid, I'm thinking. Yet, as Auteill tastefully points out to the young man whom he has just had whip him, "You're hard; that's good." Is that why men like violent movies? And is that why they can, with logic-tight compartments in place, cry out against movies with sex scenes while loving an Arnold Schwarzenburger 'kill-all with loud guns and lots of blood' fest? They have been sexually satiated with the violence, so need no 'cissy love-with-sex' scenes? The idea that adultery is worse than mass and/or state-sanctioned mass murder by my country-men still astounds me!! But maybe, this is a partial explanation.
Sade is aging, and it would have been more convincing for the maiden's introduction to sex, had Auteill not been so sexy and full of chemistry himself, as it oozes out of the screen, as though we had the ability to pump phenomes through the air!!! Museum of Fine Arts in Boston has a great auditorium (where I saw this film), but it ain't there yet!! See 'Quills', see 'Marat/Sade' and see this. All different viewpoints of a very complex point in French and world history.