Rivers of blood

Like the face of Greta Garbo, the Marquis de Sade increasingly appears to be a screen on to which we can project our own fears and desires.

Whatever the historical facts of the misdemeanours of the “Divine Marquis” who gave his name to the vice of sadism, he has become a figure who accommodates a variety of readings. Garbo’s face, as Roland Barthes pointed out, takes on the meanings we give to it because it is blank; in Sade’s case, those multiple interpretations are possible because he is so hard to pin down.

Unlike the recent Quills, which portrayed Sade as the prototype of the artist driven by his internal compulsions to create, and to feed off his own subconscious, however irrational and whatever the cost, the Marquis of Benoît Jacquot’s film Sade is an eminently rational and sensible man. Against the liberating power of the imagination in Quills was set the medical torture and dehumanisation of the psychiatry of the day; in Sade, it is clear that the social and political situation in which the Marquis finds himself provides more savagery and irrationalism than anyone should have to deal with. Sade may appear insane, but he is obviously one of the sanest people around during an insane time.

The story is set in 1795, as the French Revolution is beginning to implode and heads are rolling faster than anyone can count. Sade (Daniel Auteuil) has just been transferred from a seething, filthy prison in Paris to a convent-cum-sanatorium in the countryside. He is still a prisoner, but his prison is less horrid, and his life in less danger. This small gap of mercy is down to the fact that his mistress (Marianne Denicourt) is now involved with a member of the revolutionary council (Grégoire Colin). Of course that doesn’t exactly thrill the marquis, and he is still nearly as difficult as ever, but he does realise that he is on a razor’s edge.

Incarcerated with him at the former convent of Picpus are various members of the aristocracy. Sade, while himself a member of that class, has rejected its mores — he did, in fact, serve in a revolutionary regiment for a time. So he isn’t exactly at one with his fellow prisoners, though he does take an interest in the sexual and sentimental education of a young woman (Isild le Besco) also imprisoned at Picpus.

In the context of revolutionary violence, soon to turn on its progenitors, and the horror of mass graves, Sade’s concern with sensuality as a countervailing assertion of vital humanity makes sense. This Sade is an attractive figure, made more so by being embodied with gravitas and deep sympathy by Auteuil. And the film is a very fine one, moving with steady grace towards an inevitably sexual climax — though, oddly, it seemed mildly disjointed, as though something had been cut at a crucial moment. I am assured, though, that nothing has been removed from the print we are seeing in South Africa: the director may have made a decision to tone things down a little. If so, it is a pity, but there is a space to be filled by the viewer’s imagination, an idea that would probably appeal to the Marquis.

There is more genuine sadism in French cop thriller The Crimson Rivers. It opens with the camera lovingly examining an apparently half-rotted corpse, the individual close-ups asking us to see textures and almost abstract shapes rather than a piece of dead human flesh. That is appropriate for a murder mystery, I suppose, and the shock value of the dawning realisation of what we are looking at is effective.

But the tendency is extended, later, with the corpse (or is it another one?) being viewed on the mortuary slab, with a description of the awful torture that led to the death of this man. Again, the camera seems to hover over and then caress the corpse, aestheticising it even as the details we are being given threaten to make one feel quite ill.

I think one would feel a bit better about this kind of ghoulishness if the plot of the movie, as it unfolded, gave some weight to the meaning of human life and thus its extinction. But The Crimson Rivers turns out to be, for all its flash and dash, a relatively ordinary policier, without any of the philosophic depth one might have expected of a French thriller.

Investigating policemen Vincent Cassel and Jean Reno (doing the same taciturn act he perfected in The Professional), in fact, become ever more like their American TV counterparts as the movie progresses, bending

the rules and buddying up in that peculiarly macho aggressive way that seems typical of the profession. So they become ever less interesting, and the plot of the movie gets so complicated that one loses interest as one loses track. All in all, I would rather have been back in the madhouse with the Marquis de Sade.