Ray Pride

France's Benoît Jacquot has proven himself again and again to be a master of the telling moment in contemporary psychological dramas. Consider 1999's family crisis "Pas de scandale" (unreleased in the U.S.), 1997's "Le septième ciel" ("Seventh Heaven") and 1995's "La fille seule" ("The Single Girl") and "School of Flesh," his forthright melodrama about a female industrialist (Isabelle Huppert) making sexual contract with Quentin, a young male hustler. In the latter film, drawn from a novel by Yukio Mishima, Jacquot inverted notions of social and sexual order, but with the refinement and grace of his prior pictures. In each of these, Jacquot packs his serene work with the game of attraction, the tangible qualities of seduction, the sheen of bared skin, the gift of sight. Yet the modesty of "Sade," his latest film, worked against him, as did the existence of a larger-budgeted, more literal-minded film with the Marquis at its center, Philip Kaufman's "Quills."

"Sade" covers a brief period in the writer, thinker and rebel's libertine, libertarian life, covering a few months of imprisonment in a Jacobin countryside prison for the aristocracy during the French revolution. In this world, morals are used as an excuse for capricious and fatal judgments, and advantage is doled and withdrawn for the inconsistent reasons.

The script for Jacquot's film (by Jacques Fieschi and Bernard Minoret) is drawn partially from a novel about the Terror and from the correspondence between Sade and his wife. Daniel Auteuil, grizzled, pasty, eyes afloat in pouchy bags, plays Sade with the insolence of youth. "His reputation follows him like the pox," one of his fellow prisoners observes. There are intrigues involving the young mother of his child, Madame Quesnet (Marianne Denicourt), who lives with her lover, Emile Fournier, a key player in the revolutionary council (Colin Gregoire, as always preternaturally feral, as much cat or arrowhead as human). While their intercessions preserve Sade's life, most of the story is the dance between Sade and young Emilie de Lancris (Isild Le Besco). Under the shadow of the guillotine, can she learn to feel a fraction of what Sade has felt and thought and written in his long life?

They push; they pull. Sade tells Emilie, "Anyway, you're too pretty: I prefer a woman's flaws." There are similar, modest epigrams sprinkled throughout. "I talk to you like a philosopher," he realizes, trying to play off the young thing's awe. "But I forget your age and your sex, why is that?" He tells her that "unhappiness has made me this way." She watches, waits, conscious of the power of reserve, not yet conscious of what Sade advances, the power of release.

Benoît Delhomme's palette of natural light tends to a chill, damp pale blue, but there are memorable images, such as the jiggle of Sade's words across a flaxen page in buttery-shadowed candlelight, highlighted by blotty drops of ink as viscous as black blood. Vistas of mass graves are shown at the retreat, the murdered many who cannot help but also remind of us many massacres of the century just past, particularly in the Central Europe of recent decades.

Sade offers an aching twist on the story of middle-aged man and the timorous, tremulous angel child that is a commonplace of French cinema. (See, for example, Auteuil playing opposite Vanessa Paradis in Patrice Leconte's similarly-shaped "Girl on the Bridge.") And women learning to feel are often at the center of Jacquot's movies, from Virginie Ledoyen's escape from the expectations of friends and boyfriend in "A Single Girl" to Huppert giving herself over to the release of her sexual urges in "The School of Flesh." The effect is strange here; whatever else Jacquot has painted onto this canvas, he has made a comfortingly bourgeois portrait of a young girl being sexually initiated and instructed on how to conduct herself in future affairs of the heart and body.

The ending also has a perverse parallel to the brilliant last line of "Fight Club," "You met me at a very strange time in my life," as the friends part for good, into their own futures and our very distant past.

"Sade" opesn Friday at the Music Box.

(2002-08-28)

Also by Ray Pride

Tip of the Week
Claude Chabrol at his most elegant and sinister, examining the perversity of evil in pearlescent Swiss surroundings.
(2002-08-21)

Hit or myth
"Simone" is about the ideal of perfection. While writer-director Andrew Niccol's second feature is about female beauty and how our celebrity culture fashions it, it's also about Al Pacino's line readings. Now there's perfection.
(2002-08-21)

Reverse zoom
What kinds of movies are being made at this precise moment? With video ubiquitous in our culture, the ability to go out and make something, to shoot material inexpensively and to edit efficiently is, in theory, more democratic.
(2002-08-21)

Tip of the Week
Sandra Goldbacher's second feature, "Me Without You" is a concise gem, tracing the lives of two friends (Anna Friel, Michelle Williams) who live next door to each other in a small English town, from the 1970s to nearly today.
(2002-08-14)

Victorian Secret
(2002-08-14)

EVERYMAN OF ACTION
(2002-08-07)

TIP OF THE WEEK
(2002-08-07)

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(2002-08-07)

TIP OF THE WEEK
(2002-08-01)

CANDID CAMERA
(2002-08-01)

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(2002-07-25)

YOU'VE GOT ASS
(2002-07-25)

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