Film review 6: Quills (2000) directed by Philip Kaufman

The catholic chaplaincy at my former University shares its church and worship with an international Franciscan study centre. If you stay in Canterbury outside of term, as I often did, you end up being the only student and worshiping with a bunch of friendly sandal-wearing scholars.

On that day, I wanted to watch the movie on offer at the Student Union. It was Quills, a movie about the marquis de Sade. To my surprise, quite a portion of the Franciscan community was there too. I was younger and less ambivalent about things: I knew right, I knew wrong. I tried to stay on the sunny side of the road.

I was seating next to the habit-wearing Franciscans. While I was shocked by the movie and wanted to leave, they liked it. I couldn’t believe it as I looked at them. They were absolutely not shocked. I decided that I was going to borrow their lens for the duration of the movie. Geez, I thought, if these holy-ish Franciscans, whom I respected so very much, could like this movie, maybe there was something to it.

And there was. This movie rid me forever of my delusion that I was essentially a good individual with pure motives. I became aware of the shit that lives in me. I became so very aware of the danger of pretending that it was not there.

I began to pray in a different way, something I called the “car boot sale prayer”. I would just lay the bare truth in front of God: here’s what's in my soul, see what You can make of it. I too found freedom in the most unlikeliest of places: at the bottom of an inkwell, on the tip of a quill. Despite some heavy-handed blasphemy, Quills has been my favorite movie ever since.



P.S. There are some (moderate) scenes of sex and violence in Quills. Indeed, the whole movie is about how individuals handle violence and the roots of violence.

Maybe I should come clear about my view on the topic of violence. Violence is fine in abstract fantasized fiction, indeed fiction and writing are great outlets for it. I'm physically revulsed by, and very prepared to fight against, any type of violence -even subtle and socially acceptable- which gets played out in real life. I find even the thought of it intolerable.

The reasons why I think like this are complex. But to cut a long story short, I believe that it is the repression of violent impulses (as opposed to the confrontation of them in a safe context) that leads to stuff like the Rwandan genocide. I think that Quills makes that point quite cogently too.