Marquis

THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SEXUAL CONTENT WHICH MAY BE DISTRESSING TO SOME READERS.

'Marquis' is the only film I've ever seen by the oddly-named Henri Xhonneux, but it's so imaginative and entertaining that I'm eager to see more of his work. 'Marquis' alleges to be based on incidents in the life and novels of the Marquis de Sade. If you're seeking a "Cliff Notes" crib-sheet about de Sade or his works, look elsewhere. On its own merits, though, this film is highly enjoyable for those with a taste for the bizarre.

Some of the activities of the real-life Marquis de Sade were downright contemptible, but I intensely admire the tremendous efforts he took to write down his prose in prison (where he was forbidden to possess paper or writing implements) and to smuggle his text out of prison for publication. I was intrigued to learn that the Marquis was a prisoner in the Bastille until only a few days before it was captured by the revolutionaries in 1789; it now appears that de Sade actively fomented the riot of Bastille Day, shouting to the people outside that there were weapons and allies within the prison.

IMDb lists 'Marquis' as an animated film, but that's only partly accurate. The animation occurs chiefly in the sequences in which the Marquis de Sade has long heart-to-heart talks with his own penis! The penis has a small human face (upturned, oddly) and a voice and personality of its own.

All the characters in this film are anthropomorphised animals, walking upright and played by human dancers in elaborate costumes and masks. (I thought these were even more impressive than the ones used in the Beatrix Potter ballet film.) Thus, for example, de Sade's Justine is a white mare, dressed in a dominatrix costume which displays her very shapely human figure! Juliette is a cow, only slightly less pulchritudinous than Justine. The characters' dialogue is post-dubbed by voice artists, and the credits generously list both the performers who embody the characters and the voice artists on the soundtrack.

The filmmakers cleverly match the personalities of the various characters to appropriate animal species. Still, I was pulled up short by one scene in a coffee-house. More than a dozen species of land-based animals are interacting, and then into the room walks a fish! Somehow, it felt wrong to see an aquatic species among the land beasties. Thankfully, all of the voice artists speak normally, rather than trying to moo or whinny their dialogue.

The Marquis spends most of the film in prison, where he is harangued by his warder: a rat who is obsessed with being buggered by the Marquis. (He is apparently unaware that the Marquis's penis has its own thoughts on this matter.) I found the rat character implausible: as a warder, unlike his inmates he can go home at night and find sexual release outside the prison.

There's lots of hearty comedy here, not all of it sexual ... but the sexual content is deeply aberrant throughout the film, so 'Marquis' is not for all audiences. The animal costumes are so intensely detailed that there's an atmosphere of bestiality throughout this sexually-charged comedy. I'll rate 'Marquis' 9 out of 10.

Plainly gifted film-maker Henri Xhonneux has made an entertainingly bawdy animatronic yarn wherein the unashamedly sinful, Bastille incarcerated Marquis colourfully ruminates upon life's more fleshly pursuits with his remarkably cogent, and uncommonly outspoken reproductive organ! This deliciously deviant and impeccably playful fantasy about the dastardly double-dealing, internecine intrigues, illicit social intercourse and perfectly perfidious peccadilloes of the great and the good are wittily observed and whimsically realised in director Xhonneux's frequently fabulous, literately lewd phantasmagoria. While the ribald drama is set within the murky, Draconian confines of a jail, the joyful film itself is a luminously liberating affair, perhaps even able to uplift more than a viewer's flagging spirits!

Whatever one thinks of the recent rise of Sade as a darling of the intelligentsia and pseudo-intelligentsia, it must be admitted that some not-bad films have been made about him. This film, unfortunately, is evidence more of the trendiness than the historical interest, as its whimsical and overly-bizarre production attests. Only if there is a future sub-genre in which giant rats are sodomized by lobster tails is it likely to remain more than a curiosity. Yes, I know it had a talking penis in it. Tee hee. I still found it empty.

This is one of the strangest movies I have ever seen. I found it to be discomforting and just weird. It makes you squirm in your seat and wonder what the people making this are like in real life. It's definitely entertaining and it sort of sucks you in, especially if you don't know French and have to read subtitles. It is certainly not American and it is certainly very peculiar. I have never seen a movie where everyone is wearing life-like animal costumes and acting like humans in very abnormal ways. This movie gives me the chills. However, I would watch it again just because it is so fascinatingly WEIRD.

A live-action fable of the Marquis de Sade (and his talking penis)'s time in the Bastille, in which every character has the head of an animal.

A true one-off, this extraordinary film is as deliriously obsessed with sex as its subject, hilariously explicit in every way and yet never (in my opinion) actually pornographic. The rubber animal faces, though remarkably expressive, cleverly make it impossible to forget what you are watching is only a fairy tale, a procession of symbols clashing in a marching philosophical fiesta.

It makes me wish more films had been made in this unique style, but it was the director, Henri Xhonneux's, last, and I don't think there's been anything even remotely like it ever since. Or before, for that matter.