Geoffrey Rush plays the Marquis de Sade, a character like Rantes in Man Facing Southeast–too good for his own good, misunderstood by the world system, and eventually put into an insane asylum. Knowing true reality is beautiful, loving, and gentle, he defiantly portrays non-reality and all of its distortions in his writings. He becomes an enemy of the rich and the powers that be who perpetrate non-reality.The vicious director of the insane asylum, Dr. Antoine Royer-Collard (Michael Caine), enjoys torturing others and, of course, eventually tortures the Marquis because his writings prove to be all too true and thousands people inside and outside sanitarium become followers of his works. The director of the sanitarium is told by the power elite to stop his writing at all costs since they couldn't discredit him in the first place by saying he was insane.
The dominant system tries to do the same thing to other writers, men like John Bunyan who wrote "Pilgrim's Progress," and in this century, even Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote some of his greatest works while in political prisons. The list is long. In my opinion, the madness inside a sanitarium doesn't not quite meet the madness outside of it. The character of Dr. Antoine Royer-Collard is obviously much more insane than the Marquis.
This film has many twists and lessons. For instance, it portrays how sometimes you can love someone and think they are unreachable, because society has tried to make you ugly. You never then try to touch the heart of that one who would most likely accept you, because they too have been made untouchable in some way by the very system that has labeled them one thing or another. So you never go after your dreams or your loves. Sexuality is a gift of God, the distortion of it is a lie by whom the world calls Satan or the devil. For every beautiful thing that God has created there is the lie of the dark side. If you are narrow-minded, a fundamentalist, and self-righteous, you should not watch this move, because you fit the description of the director of the sanitarium and those he works for.
~Van of Urantia*MPAA = Motion Picture Association of America
