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This is a dull exercise in…nothing, not even style. It's not that I resent de Sade related issues but the movies that tackled his writings always had something cheap in them. From the Franco "attempts" in the sixties and seventies to the more modern Quills I am left wandering what is in the head of the movie-makers that persist in drawing endless glosses on Justine and Juliette. De Sade was a sensation during his age because he was rather off base and had a life filled with debauchery and perversion. Justine is actually an interesting literary work, far from great but good for entertainment purposes and to see what could have entered the mind of a man from the period. Roland Topor is a darling of queerness, from his novel Le Locataire and his role as Renfield in Herzog's Nosferatu to his artistic design in this movie he never ceases to surprise. There are a few good ideas here, the Marquis talking to his penis (face and brain and personality of its own), the representation of animal lust through animal costumes. But much of the film seems too contrived. It tries to show the real thing in the most artificial manner possible, much like the Marquis himself in his books. But that also takes away the beauty of the decadent style we have come to associate with de Sade. Seeing not a woman but a cow and thinking women are only cows good enough to be milked by misogynistic males gets the story "straight" but forces us to the superficial level of immediate perception. Sade was great in what he did because he managed to maintain the veil of hypocrisy and ignorance intact and at the same time showing what was underneath. His style was very "light" inviting his audience to divert themselves in the most unthinkable for that age acts of voyeurism He was a man of his time and would have probably hated to live today when sex is something more present in our lives than anything else. I think the movie fails to convey Sade's intentions and doesn't have the edgy quality that would have made it something challenging for today's viewer. Its problem is not the explicit character but the lack of it. I am really looking forward to a director that will finally break all the clichés and give us an insolent, pornographic, violent and gut-wrenching movie based on de Sade instead of these impotent, artsy attempts at a style that barely manage to elicit a yawn
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