Sade

‘When you hear the name Sade or hear that a film is called Sade, you expect it to be full of orgies and torture. What interested me was to construct a character that was closer to the idea that I had of Sade. I think he’s a man who clung to his freedom like a treasure and paid very dearly for it.’ Jacquot’s fictional portrait of France’s most revered rebel is set during an unknown period in the author’s life: 1794, at the height of the Terror, when Sade was sent to Picpus, a sanitarium and aristocratic way station on the road to the guillotine. If the film was initially misunderstood, it was partly for the reasons Jacquot articulated – this deft, relaxed, quietly ingratiating film has none of the rhetorical excesses and camouflaged prurience of the ridiculous Quills. Even more to the point, this is another of Jacquot’s explorations of a young woman’s consciousness, in this case the wholly fictional character of a Viscount’s daughter named Emilie (Isild Le Besco), in the guise of a historical film. Not that Daniel Auteuil’s brilliant performance doesn’t put Sade in a new light – a witty, utterly charming, erudite artist with a passionate interest in humanity. (KJ)