The Abbé de Coulmier, the historical Abbé de Coulmier that is, was a jolly nice man. On his watch the asylum of Charenton did away with straitjackets, dunking & locking the inmates in cages, in favour of special diets & a little regular bleeding to keep everybody calm. However, he was also extremely short & had a hunchback. So, the world of film has played its standard card for humanitarian heroes (also to be seen in the recent Whistleblower starring Rachel Weisz, no offence Kathy Bolkovac), & cast him as a knicker-melting dreamboat.

Smouldering, obviously

I do not wish to mislead anyone; Quills is not a good film. I have watched it enough times to be sure about that. Nevertheless, the Abbé is a complex-ish character who falls squarely into the pious-yet-passionate Hot Monk gang. His development is expressed through a shifting oppositionality; he always takes the Good position in a Good vs Evil dichotomy, but good & evil shift & switch as the narrative progresses. At first the Abbé, although he is more liberal than most, represents the interests of society against the Marquis de Sade’s (played by Geoffrey Rush) libertine, sexually criminal values. The Marquis is permitted to write, as catharsis, but not to publish, which represents a risk to order & authority. This opposition allows us to perceive the (sexy) slips in the Abbé’s rigid suppression of his libido, whether he’s snogging a trembling Kate Winslet (cheeky & tragic as laundry maid Madeline) or forgetting his pacifism when the Marquis poses the question to which every monk fancier wants to know the answer:

“These chastity vows of yours. How strict are they? Suppose you only put it in her mouth?”

Phwoar. The basic point here is that repression is sexy. Take the monk’s habit as a case in point: for the modern heterosexual woman, the male body is uninteresting, over-exposed, even banal. The monk’s habit, however, which both covers up the body & designates it as out-of-bounds to both sexuality & violence, allows us to experience something akin to the fetishization of the female body that is so famously tied to the Victorian era; it actually becomes exciting to see a man take his shirt off.

What is he dreaming of?

For the Abbé, this wavering eventually becomes an opportunity missed. After a terrible accident under the new regime of Michael Caine’s bureaucratic torture-addict, Phoenix’s affair with Winslet is doomed to remain unconsummated. However, with the physical passions already awakened, the Abbé is soon self-flagellating & dreaming of ripping off Winslet’s funerary shroud. His own psyche is stretched beyond its limit, leading him to a bastardised occupation of the Marquis’s position (too late for the fictional de Sade, here dying with his own shit in his mouth but in real life enjoying himself for many more years), in opposition to that which is revealed to be the true evil: hypocrisy. The hypocrisy of a society which keeps young women cloistered from the world, only to deliver them yet more vulnerable into the hands of wrinkly old perverts like Michael Caine’s character, a society which tortures the victims of its own inequalities, & which makes a supreme virtue of locking oneself up in a puritanical pressure cooker & seeing what bizarre or masochistic vicissitudes that gives rise to. At least, that’s what lots of people in the 18^th century were starting to think, which is why so much Hot Monk material comes from, or is set in, this period. Whether willing or unwilling participants in passion, the sexually transgressive monk is presented not as an aberration, but as the inevitable result of a hypocritical value system. The Hot Monk’s sexiness lies precisely in this juxtaposition, not of appearances with “true” nature, but of the ostensibly pious goal with the anti-natural, excessive sexuality which is actually produced. Moreover, Joaquin Phoenix has a hare-lip scar, & they’re really hot.

Anyway, here’s the trailer. It gives a pretty accurate impression of the film’s quality.