RUSH SHINES IN DARK, BRILLIANT 'QUILLS'.

Byline: Bob Strauss Film Critic

If you can't have fun with the Marquis de Sade, why even bother?

Fortunately, director Philip Kaufman (``Henry and June,'' ``The Unbearable Lightness of Being''), scripter Doug Wright (adapting his stage play) and, especially, lead actor Geoffrey Rush (``Shine'') know how to party on the lip of perdition. There's a jaunty naughtiness to ``Quills'' that, miraculously, enhances its very serious inquiries into the darkest possibilities of man and society.

Relentlessly smart and witheringly critical, yet morally playful to the core, the film is a clever gloss on everything the debauched aristocrat represents.

And in a delectable irony that the Marquis himself might have drooled over, this movie that twists the very concepts of free expression and suppression into indistinguishable knots arrives at the height of a national debate on censorship. If the picture has one flaw - well, two, if even the most liberated libertine inside you can only take so much of Rush's naked torso - it's in making the key representative of prohibition an easily discounted hypocrite rather than a true crusader in the Joe Lieberman mold.

But these are mere rope burns on a story that hogties contrasting views of physical and mental freedom, artistry and overindulgence, spirituality and self-knowledge, and enlightenment and insanity into grotesque configurations of often stunning brilliance. All which, quite appropriately, look exquisitely painful.

Following an eroticized opening guillotine tableau that Rush's Marquis observes, frightened and inspired, from one of the many prison windows he leered through in his lifetime, the story settles into his final incarceration, some two decades after The Terror, at Charenton asylum.

It's there, the fact-mangling scenario would have it, that the pampered pornographer composes his scandalous ``Justine,'' which he has surreptitiously smuggled out to a publisher by a virginal but breathlessly curious chambermaid, Madeleine (Kate Winslet in a smart and soulful reworking of the adventure-hungry innocent she played in ``Titanic'').

When a copy of the, um, masterpiece is read to Napoleon, the emperor demands, as is his nature, action. To that end, Dr. Royer-Collard (a cold- as-steel Michael Caine), a ``progressive'' psychologist whose treatment for the mentally ill makes the father of sadism's sickest fantasies look like comfy chairs, is dispatched to Charenton to clean up the mess. There he finds the liberal-minded master of the institution, Abbe Coulmier (Joaquin Phoenix), giving the well-paying Marquis pretty much run of the place: living in a lavishly furnished cell, directing ``therapeutic'' theatricals starring the other inmates, coming on outrageously to having-none-ot Madeleine, etc.

The cleric is also smitten with the ripe young maid and considers himself a friend of the Marquis. But as the decadent artiste continues to export his lascivious writings, Collard forces the uncertain Abbe into taking increasingly extreme measures to silence the monster. First, the Marquis' quills and ink are taken away, then the wine he learns to write with, then the sheets he still manages to scribble on ... by the end, stripped of everything, he's reduced to scrawling on walls with his own blood and feces and dictating his literature through madmen.

But his creativity will not be squelched. Indeed, ``Quills'' suggests that repressing expression only makes it more extreme - and when your starting point is ``120 Days of Sodom,'' we're talking as extreme as it possibly gets - and that those who would impose their propriety on others are the true perverts.

But the dialectic here is more complicated than that. The Marquis de Sade's words, not to mention the example he sets, indeed incite tragedy in very direct ways. On the other hand, the man who lent his name to the pleasure of pain-infliction is, well before the story's end, unmasked as the ultimate masochist, even a martyr to a misguided, but nonetheless holy, notion of artistic purity.

It's all deep stuff, of the kind director Kaufman has made ponderous pretension to in the past. But things are kept lively and vigorous in ``Quills,'' due in no small part to our irrepressible host. Rush's performance is so far over everything we can't even see the top from where he's operating. It's a lip-smacking, eye-rolling, pun-hissing barrage of unbridled license - unconscionable by many measures of good acting and utterly right for the game at hand.

Kaufman rises to the occasion, too, creating as richly imaged a movie as he's ever made. The voyeuristic wit on display here is, of course, profuse. But as the climax rolls around, he's working at a level of true visual profundity, up to and including a profane Pieta of man's inseparably dual nature.

``Quills'' hardly settles the never-ending debate over whether the Marquis de Sade was just an exceptionally energetic sicko or something like a real philosopher. The film does, however, come perilously close to confirming that art really can lie somewhere near the heart of the ugliest, most awful truth.

``QUILLS''

(Rated R: violence, nudity, sex, language)

The stars: Geoffrey Rush, Kate Winslet, Joaquin Phoenix, Michael Caine, Amelia Warner.

Behind the scenes: Directed by Philip Kaufman. Written by Doug Wright, based on his play. Produced by Julia Chasman, Nick Wechsler and Peter Kaufman. Released by Fox Searchlight Pictures.

Running time: Two hours, four minutes.

Playing: Sunset 5, West Hollywood; NuWilshire, Santa Monica.

Our rating: Three and one half stars

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Photo:

Michael Caine, left, stars as the ``progressive'' psychologist Dr. Royer- Collard, with Amelia Warner as his child bride, Simone, in ``Quills.''