Quills

“Meet the Marquis de Sade. The pleasure is all his.”

The Marquis de Sade (Geoffrey Rush) has been locked in the Charenton asylum, but his stories keep leaving it, carried out by the laundress Madeleine LeClerc (Kate Winslet). Abbé du Coulmier (Joaquin Phoenix) runs the place and believes in gentleness, until Dr. Royer-Collard (Michael Caine) arrives from Paris with orders to stop the pages for good. Philip Kaufman stages the fight over one man's writing as a question of who gets to decide what others may read.