Director: Philip Kaufman
Cast: Geoffrey Rush, Kate Winslet, Joaquin Phoenix, Michael Caine
Have I Seen It Before: Nope.
Did I Like It: It’s the ultimate fate of a period piece to become an entirely new kind of artifact after just a few years. This film is about the late 18th century, but it is desperate to say more than a few things about the insane puritanical bent of the late 1990s and early 2000s. Thus, by the 2020s it seems antiquated all over again, and might, just might reach for a new level of awareness in the process.
Kaufman viewed Dr. Royer-Collard (Caine) as an allegory of Kenneth Starr, and at that point in time, the comparison seems apt. In the 1990s, nobody cared about about the transgressions that enticed Starr’s obsessions, but it was only after Starr died and in the fullness of time that it became clear everything about which we’ve clutched our pearls was built on hypocrisy. We suspected it back then, and maybe it’s just the November of 2026 of it all, but the Republican party never fails to get around to eventually proving that they had no standing on which to complain about the morals of others.
But the later 2010s and the early 2020s* had more to say about sex than we could have ever dreamed about in Napoleonic France or the turn of the millennium. Royer-Collard was a villain the whole time, but we know now the lecherous beast that lived in the heart of this sketch of the Marquis de Sade (Rush, who never looks like he’s having a bad time, now that I think about it) is indeed a foul creature, completely unaware of the slightest notion of consent when his appetites are at risk. It might have taken a bit too long for us to come around to that way of thinking.
*Which I think we just recently finished. Felt like that was going to last forever.