Sexless Sade

>> Jacquot's version of the Marquis is too clean for its own good

by SIOBHÀN O'CONNOR

It would seem impossible to take an historical figure as layered and risqué as Marquis de Sade and make him boring. The story basically writes itself: bad-boy aristocrat shakes things up on the eve of the French Revolution with his naughty tell-all books and iconoclastic philosophical treatises.

Imprisoned for "deviant sexual behaviour," Sade spent much of his life behind bars until his greyer years, when he was transferred to Picpus, the five-star jewel-box prison for the exclusive French set. Yet somehow, in French director Benoit Jacquot's latest feature, Sade, the Marquis seems more washed-up old rebel than intriguing and sexy personality.

A weathered Daniel Auteuil stars as the Marquis alongside the lovely, teenagerly Emilie (Isild la Besco), the prudish virgin Sade wants so badly to school in the bawdier bits of life without having to do it himself. Jacquot places their relationship at the centre of the film to unsatisfying ends, mostly because their relationship never really amounts to much.

It's clear that much time, love and money went into the luscious Sade, from the lavish costumes to the dead-on cast to the impeccable sets, it's all there. The problem is that Jacquot has settled for a somewhat flat view of one of the more intriguing personalities in French history. Auteuil has clearly given his heart and soul to the part but the dialogue is so contrived ("Follow your instincts!") and obvious ("I am who I am and no one will change me!") that his efforts go to waste.

That Sade is almost entirely sexless--save one powerful scene in which Sade pairs up Emilie with the hottie gardener and watches them go at it--could be seen as a brave move. On the other hand, Jacquot seems to have felt he had to strip Sade of all his so-called deviant behaviour to show once and for all that he was, above all else, a thinker. The trouble with this is that Jacquot's film is playing to a seen-it-all, done-it-all audience, one that doesn't need to be reminded that even though the Marquis liked sex, he was also a noble, intelligent freedom-fighter. It's an unfortunate pitfall, one that essentially makes the film dryer than it ought to have been.

Sade opens Friday, Nov. 10