After his release, he spent approximately a decade writing scandalous manuscripts and putting on plays before his activities once again landed him at Charenton, where he spent the rest of his life. Quills , although a fictionalized account of the Marquis' last years, is moderately faithful to the historical record. The characterization of the title character, despite being softened to make the man bearable to a mainstream audience, captures some of Sade's essence. As portrayed by the energetic Geoffrey Rush in a brilliant turn that avoids the easy path of caricaturization, Sade is a shrewd, dangerous man with an intelligence that is matched in magnitude by his perverse sexual desires. Rush's interpretation of the Marquis is not easily forgotten, and eclipses that of French actor Daniel Auteuil in Benoit Jacquot's Sade , a 2000 feature that does not yet have a United States distributor.
Quills has a difficult task - one at which it succeeds.
It must give a sense of Sade's depravity and tendencies towards evil without alienating the audience. Those of a delicate conscience may be offended by the movie, but the images it conjures in the mind are more disturbing than those depicted on screen. Most of Quills ' sexual content comes in the form of excerpts from the Marquis' writings. Thematically, the movie tackles issues that are as relevant today as they were during Sade's time. The salacious and melodramatic aspects of the film hold our interest on a superficial level, but the underlying richness of the subtext is what elevates Quills above the level of a traditional period piece bio-pic.