Quills is a must-see movie for anyone who's ever felt completely frustrated by their inability to explain or understand their compulsion to write.
The fact that the author in the troika of author, reader, critic in Quills' plot is the Marquis de Sade only serves to furnish the film with the vivid means to illustrate a writer's inability to not write the stories within, regardless of the nature of those stories or the tortures to which the author might be subjected by critics, especially if said critics happen to have him or her held captive in a lunatic asylum (in this case, the infamous Charenton) equipped with lots of nasty implements of medical torture.
It's not a film about de Sade's writings. It's about his need (and the general human need) to write. It's about the deep and hungry human need to hear stories, and the complex nature of this need. It's also about the paradoxes of sadism and sanity, most frequently illustrated in the context of repeated references to St. Augustine's theory that the demonic and the angelic are equally represented in the soul of every individual. It's about judgment, and redemption. It's about innocence and experience, as in William Blake's Songs of same. Take all of this and matrix or mathem them; because Quills is about all their varied interactions.
But mostly, it's about writing.
I just saw this film on DVD last night, and I'm still rocking, rolling, and reeling. I'm being thin on details about the film because almost anything specific would be a terrible spoiler - everything is that beautifully interconnected in the narrative structure of the script.
But I have to warn you, dear noder, in case you're currently balancing on any kind of edge and are endeavoring to keep your balance: be prepared for some truly haunting, possibly indelible, and certainly enduring images and utterances.