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The Snowman & The Marquise
An Oft-Hand Movie Review
R.A.Barrington
Scarred by a snowman, I went to sleep only to awaken to the sweet sound of a familiar man’s voice. “I have brought you gifts…the movie “Quills”, a bag of popcorn, and a jug of freshly brewed iced tea chocked full of lemons. It is a story about the Marquise de Sade.”
The man snuggled me up in a blue and white comforter. He placed his hand on my knee. I picked up his hand with my hand and snuck it inside the blanket, onto my upper thigh, under the silk of my robe.
The wicked tale opens with a narrator talking about a woman who feeds each depraved orifice, afflicting pain and pleasure with equal zest. A beautiful woman, her hair in soft Renaissance ringlets, is being prepared for the guillotine. The director pans to a laughing horde as the young woman looks down into a huge basket of severed heads.
His hand slides between my legs, between my swollen lips. I am as slippery as an eel.
“Have you seen this?” I ask
“No…waiting for you.”
The movie cuts to the asylum where the Marquise de Sade, who has been diagnosed as suffering from “libertine dementia”, is writing in his cell. He is old, with a life of debauchery behind him. When he first arrived he was wretched, foaming at the mouth, a lustful animal. In his wisdom, he took a rich wife and she pays his stipend on a room that is quite like a suite with a private bedroom, erotic sculptures, and a splendid desk. The abbey has suggested that Sade try writing to soothe his soul. It works rather successfully. In fact, the Marquise is smuggling his sex stories out to a publisher via a laundress. The people of France are reading “Justine.”
He slides his hand out of the covers, places it to his mouth, and licks the side that is wet with me.
I am hearing someone reading passages from “Justine.” “The professor lifted her skirt. “Let me be your tutor in the ways of love.” He gazed upon her Venus mound, her flaxen quim the winking eye of God.”
…as he enters me. He strokes the length of my coast, occasionally slipping out from the ocean of my wetness, and I am begging him, pleading, please, please reenter me.
We might have missed most of the movie the first time, so we watched it again, with full attention.
Although sex is the motif used in “Quills”, the real thrust of the story is the Marquise’s need to write, his lascivious salvation, the only course to preserve his mind from mental collapse.
When the church takes away his ink and quills, he writes an entire story on a white sheet with his dinner wine using a chicken bone as a quill. Embarrassed that he is still being published, the abbey orders his room/cell be stripped of everything.
Throughout the story the Marquise is clad in a white, tailored, dandy suit complete with platform shoes and a powdered wig. Using his own blood he writes an entire new story that begins on one sleeve, crosses the back, and ends on his waistcoat.
Now the church is angry beyond belief and they throw the Marquise in a dungeon, naked, chaining his leg to the floor. He dies there, swallowing a crucifix, his last story written on the stone walls with his own shit.
This movie is worth two hours of your time. It stars Geoffery Rush, Michael Caine, Kate Winslet, Jaquine Phoenix. If you liked “Dangerous Liasons” or the updated version, “Cruel Intentions” I think you will like this one. See it with your lover. He or she may get “ideas!” If you have a writegirl she will like it very much, she will want to smooch you for introducing her to the Marquise who would not stop scribbling no matter what.