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By Dan Leone

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LESS SCHEMATIC BUT also less compelling than Phillip Kaufman's recent take on the notorious Marquis de Sade, Quills, this new French historical drama provides an unsensationalized look at that nation's most famous libertine. Sade (Daniel Auteuil) is seen here rather late in his career – sent by temporarily presiding revolutionist Robespierre to a remote estate turned holding station for aristocrats awaiting either freedom or the guillotine. No stranger to incarceration, he finds these digs relatively luxurious, and as a longtime advocate for overthrowing monarchy and other vestiges of feudalism, he would seem to have less to worry about than his anxious fellow captives. But the current administration judges him a different form of menace, one who is dangerous for his unapologetic atheism as well as his unadmitted, albeit widely rumored, authorship of "filthy" books and plays. (You gotta give the marquis, as well as his inquisitors, some credit: those literary works still aren't fit for Christian consumption.) Things get considerably less pleasant once the unaccustomed-to-labor, bewigged "inmates" are forced to dig a gigantic hole – one that, it soon emerges, will hold the torsos and disconnected heads of their social equals. Still, Sade finds time to amuse himself in various ways. He hooks up with a former mistress, sneaks a subversive play staging past the authorities, and takes particular interest in Emilie (Isild Le Besco), the inexperienced yet not quite naive 15-year-old daughter of a philandering viscount. His idea of widening her, er, intellectual horizons naturally assumes rather voyeuristic and manipulative forms. Auteuil creates a fittingly complex central figure, one both admirable and simply indulgent in his flouting of conventional morality. Yet cleverly plotted and well-mounted as Sade is, the low-key style doesn't quite suit the wide-canvas costume-drama form as well as it has director Benoît Jacquot's finely wrought, small-frame contemporary tales (The School of Flesh, A Single Girl). The results are entertaining and intelligent, but some deeper resonance is missing. (Dennis Harvey)