Marat/Sade

source: Marat/Sade

I was in college when PBS in the U.S. showed Marat/Sade. I was blown away by the remarkable performance of Glenda Jackson. I had never heard the name before, but I was certain she was a great actress who would have a brilliant career. With all the outrageousness on the screen, with the layers of her characterization -- a deeply disturbed woman putting in great effort to parrot her scripted lines in a staccato voice -- she truly disappeared into this "inmate" portraying the role of Charlotte Corday. I've watched it again today for the first time in almost 40 years. And it still impresses me. Plus, I turned out to be right. Glenda Jackson proved herself to be one of the great actresses of her generation. Her decision to leave acting is a loss to all of us. I wish I could see what she would do with a new character at her present age.

It has been a while since I have seen this film so I can't remember everything, but I'm going write a blurb based on how I remember feeling after viewing it. One aspect of the movie was brilliant and another was poor. The movie was generally boring to me and I fault the director for that. It felt like a filmed play, which may have been the intention, as it was originally a play. But I don't think it worked. The most engaging performance was that of Patrick Magee, who was already a seasoned film actor at the time, and I truly believe he helped bring much of the cinematic qualities. The rest of the performances felt amateurish, relatively, since portraying those who are mentally disturbed allows for more suspension of disbelief on the part of the audience. The pacing needed to be more dynamic but it wasn't. And I would have liked it to be more pleasant to the eye with better photography and set design -- some eye candy to keep the interest. I say that because what ends up happening is that words become the main focus. Focusing entirely on words takes away the essence of a film. You have the opportunity to include so much subtlety and such a unique perspective and to not have it seems a shame. But now there is the other side. The screenplay, the story and the concepts are nothing short of phenomenal. It is highly academic but not arrogant and is very rewarding if the investment in understanding the history relied on is made. So interesting was the commentary and the philosophy it asserted and so clever was the manipulation and method by which it was illustrated. I give great credit to all of the writing involved. Although, I was not impressed with this film either cinematically nor in the sense of a significant number of the performances, the rest was enough for me to award it a seven out of ten. I feel it was enough to make it worth viewing and I would love to see the play if directed as cleverly as the words deserve. It was smart and different... two commendable qualities that are in short supply.

The date is July 13, 1808, exactly 15 years after the revolutionary Jean-Paul Marat was stabbed to death in his bathtub by 24 year old Charlotte Corday. To commemorate the anniversary (and to show off the hospital's own special brand of art therapy) a group of inmates at Charenton Asylum perform a play recreating Marat's last days, written and directed by the infamous Marquis de Sade. The players include a recovering paranoiac, a narcoleptic also suffering from "melancholia," a sex maniac, a former priest, a former prostitute, and a patient so incensed by his role that he is confined to a straight-jacket the entire time. As the play progresses, delving into the political and social unrest of the French Revolution and the Reign of Terror, the players discuss and debate the purpose of revolution, the horrors of war, the futility of activism, the need for equality, the impossibility of equality, the desire for freedom, the importance of individuality, and the relationship between murder and sexual passion. To start with. Oh, and it's a musical too. This is a great movie. One of the most intellectually challenging and rewarding movies I've ever seen. Directed by Peter Brook and performed by the Royal Shakespeare Company, it's a filmed version of Peter Weiss' play of the same name. It demands a lot of a viewer. Once it starts, it doesn't give you much room to breathe. It just takes off running and you are forced to keep up with it. It's one of the few movies I've ever seen where I was agreeing and disagreeing with every main character at various points. It's almost too much to take in in one sitting. I've seen it several times and I still feel like there's more to get out of it. I knew next to nothing about the French Revolution going in, but I still felt like I understood the issues at hand. They can just as easily apply to modern American society. The acting is uniformly excellent. The three main players--Patrick Magee (de Sade), Ian Richardson (Marat), and Glenda Jackson (Corday)--are all outstanding. Magee brings a unique humanity to a man largely considered by history to be a savage pervert. Richardson's Marat is heartbreaking. Endlessly staring ahead, he knows his cause is probably lost but can't give up on it. Jackson is stunning as both the impassioned Corday and the patient desperately trying to spit out her lines before she falls asleep again. There isn't a note out of place in the whole cast. What I can't get over is that these actors had already performed these roles on stage umpteen times before they made the film. That they performed such a challenging play night after night with the same kind of talent, intensity and passion you see on the screen is remarkable. Marat/Sade is definitely a polarizing film. I wasn't sure I liked it until the second time I watched it. But I couldn't stop thinking about it after the first. It's disturbing, frightening, funny and demanding (sometimes all at the same time), but in my opinion, it's worth seeing at least once.

Brilliant in every way. A film of a play about a play put on by the inmates of the Asylum of Charenton in France, 1808, as directed by the Marquis de Sade (played by Patrick Magee). Filmed plays are often criticized for their staginess, but this one quite requires that feeling. The actors are separated from the audience, which appears from time to time, by metal bars, which also appear from time to time. Most of the film takes place in the middle of the play, with the lunatics seeming dangerously in our faces. The man who runs the asylum sits on the side (behind the bars) and occasionally walks out onto the stage to calm his residents down, or to castigate the Marquis for including certain undesirable notions in his play. The subject of the play is the nature and importance of human cruelty as demonstrated by the French Revolution (which ended some 15 years earlier), but which continues on, even to the present, far beyond the actual setting of the play. About a thousand ideas are thrown out throughout the film, and it's difficult to catch them all. It's the kind of movie that sets the head reeling, and it made me want to watch it again ASAP. The actors are all brilliant. Besides Magee, Glenda Jackson deserves special praise for her performance as the narcoleptic inmate who plays the executioner of Marat. I didn't mention that other name in the title because I am unfamiliar with the historical character. I understood the gist of his role in the Revolution, but I'd like to learn more before I rewatch the film. Peter Brook's direction is fantastic; he kept my heart rate up throught the entire film. I'm thinking about getting the DVD, especially if it has subtitles. It is sometimes difficult to understand the dialogue, and almost impossible to understand the song lyrics. Oh, did I mention it was a musical? 10/10.

I'm surprised that this rated so high and receive such universal praise. It's virtually unwatchable in terms of mainstream entertainment and shouldn't have found any audience to appreciate it. It's shrill, endless and stagey. But it's conceits (The context and meaning of the murder of French Revolutionary figure Marat by Charlotte Corday, enacted as a play by post-revolutionary mental patients & penned by the similarly imprisoned Marquis de Sade) are unique and provocative. The play within the play has musical numbers; a trifle given to Corday (Glenda Jackson) as de Sade supplies her with the murder weapon is really nice; "...but love meant something... to you, ...I see, and something much different to me..." The bench duet between Charlotte and her sex-crazed nemesis is memorable. You will need a working understanding of the major players of the French Revolution and a willingness to listen to Marat expound on political theory at length. I own the DVD and even I can't sit through the damned thing. I also really hate some of the typical thespian casting (the all-clown Greek chorus giving it their all is excruciating) but I pop it in now and again to watch it in twenty-minute bursts. There's plenty to think about and though the Bourgeoisie are clearly portrayed as villainous swine, it still doesn't offer any easy answers to the long, painful aftermath of the French Revolution. Sadly, Patrick McGhee (A Clockwork Orange) is the type of leading man who would never again be seen after the advent of focus-groups and the blockbuster. What teen wants to look at anyone over thirty on screen? Les Miz is shallow cream pie compared to this.

One must read the play and see the background of Peter Weiss in order to get the full feel of this movie. It is absolutely the best presentation of the politics of man and our inability to ever resolve the major issues of our existence. Peter Weiss has fully captured the unending struggle between the politics necessary to obtain freedom versus that which enslaves. The best parts are the discussions between Sade and Marat as to the results of freedom versus dictatorship and capitalism versus socialism. The entire story provides a voyage through the human comedy and shows the inability of humanity to ever figure out the real truth of our existence and relationship to each other and our socitey. The result is a better understanding of the sinusoidal flow of the give an take of our history.

This takes place in 1808 in an insane asylum. The Marquis de Sade (Patrick Magee) puts on a play of an assassination for an audience. He uses the other inmates as actors. Things slowly get out of hand leading to a truly horrifying ending. I first caught this way back in 1980 at a center for adult education. It was a video of the movie shown for free. The picture was murky and the sound was terrible. Still I sat through it. I just caught it again (over 20 years later) on cable. This time I could see and hear it clearly. I'm not going to pretend that I understand what this is about, aside from the basic premise about a bunch of inmates putting on a play, and I do know it was based on a stage play. Still, I watched all 2 hours. The acting is great across the board but Magee, Ian Richardson and Glenda Jackson (in her major film debut) are exceptional. The movie is disturbing--I realize these are all actors playing roles but they're so good that you believe everything you're seeing. The direction also is masterful--it opens up the play cinematically. It has an R rating but that's mostly for subject matter and a brief * scene with Richardson. This isn't for everybody--some people will be bored silly by it--but for those who like challenging movies this fits the bill. The ending is very disturbing. I give it a 7.

I just watched the MGM DVD, which is a fine letterboxed transfer. (I also saw the movie a few years after it was released.) Marat/Sade is an amazingly original and stunningly powerful philosophical and psychological descent into one of the most complex periods of recorded history, the French Revolution, the Terror that ensued, and the rise of Napoleon and his empire. The multi-layered ideas come thick and fast; I had to watch the movie over two nights because there's so much to think about, and some of the words and images are so overwhelming. Of the Royal Shakespeare Company actors in the film (little known at the time), Glenda Jackson had the most notable subsequent career, but Ian Richardson (Marat) has also done remarkable things (and he's so young here, you may not recognize him). This is not a movie for casual entertainment, but if you care about history and the deepest questions of good and evil and free will, you'll find much of value here.

MARAT/SADE is the film version of a play that arose from an actor's workshop exploring various theatrical theories expressed by French actor-director-writer Antoine Artard, who extolled a style of performance he described as "theatre of cruelty"--which, broadly speaking, consists of an assault upon the audience's senses by every means possible. Ultimately, and although it makes effective use of its setting and the cinematography mirrors the chaos expected of such a situation, the film version of MARAT/SADE is less a motion picture than a record of a justly famous stage play that offers a complex statement re man's savagery. The story of MARAT/SADE concerns the performance of a play by inmates of an early 1800s insane asylum, with script and direction by the infamous Marquis de Sade. (While this may sound a bit far-fetched, it is based on fact: de Sade was known to have written plays for performance by inmates during his own incarceration in an asylum.) The story of the play concerns the assassination of the revolutionary Marat by Charotte Corday, but the play itself becomes a debate between various characters, all of which may be read as in some way intrinsically destructive and evil. Since all the characters are played by mentally-ill inmates of the asylum (the actor playing Marat, for example, is described as a paranoid, and the actress playing Corday suffers from sleeping sickness and melancholia), the debate is further fueled by their insanity, unpredictability as performers, and the staff's reactions to both their behavior and the often subversive nature of the script they play out. Patrick Magee as de Sade, Glenda Jackson as the inmate playing Corday (it was her breakout performance), and Ian Richardson as the inmate playing Marat offering impressive performances; indeed, the ensemble cast as a whole is incredibly impressive, and they keep the extremely wordy script moving along with considerable interest. Even so, it will be obvious that the material works better as a live performance than as a film, and I do not recommend it to a casual viewer; its appeal will be largely limited to the literary and theatrical intelligentsia. The DVD includes the original theatrical trailer, but beyond this there are no extras of any kind. Gary F. Taylor, aka GFT, Amazon Reviewer