Sade

Although very different from Kaufman's Quills, Jacquot's film also focuses on an aging and incarcerated marquis, this time on the orders of Robespierre, in a country house run like a hotel for the enemies of the Republic. Here, however, the infamous libertine is portrayed as a free thinker and convivial, erudite intellectual. At the climax he deflowers a virgin of noble birth by proxy, and insists he's whipped for it, but that's the only remotely salacious sequence in a reasonably engrossing, well acted if underwhelming drama.