Marat/Sade

The film is essentially a filmed record of the live theatre production by the Royal Shakespeare Co. that toured to New York in the late 1960's and was filmed for Art House distribution by Universal.

This is one of my all-time favorite films because of the sheer density of meaning in it. The story is set in an asylum in 1808 in the Napoleonic era, and the play within it is set in 1793 during the most violent part of the French Revolutionary era. Most of the dialogue has relevance to political criticism in both eras. If that were not enough, it also has levels that are clearly evoking the era that the playwright Weiss was writing in (the 1960's) and also Germany's recent (Holocaust/WWII) past. Some passages in the play, most notably those relating to war, manage to have a level of meaning for ALL FOUR eras at once! Because I show this film to classes, I've seen it dozens of times and I'm continually intrigued by it because each viewing reveals new meanings as it seems to weirdly comment on the current day's events that occurred long after it was written and filmed. The first viewing is often disorienting because it piles so much historic-socio-sexual-political content up with so much odd directing and extreme acting style that it is hard to grasp at first, but repeated viewings suck you in like an intellectual's Rocky Horror Picture Show, and some theatre junkies learn to sing along.

The Film of the Royal Shakespeare Company production of Marat/Sade (1967) is considered a classic avant garde 1960's drama in the style known as "Theatre of Cruelty". It is often shown to university level theatre classes because it has wonderful examples of both Artaud and Brecht theatre styles in it. I show it to my classes and it never fails to blow their undergraduate minds. It stars Glenda Jackson as Charlotte Corday (now Dame Glenda Jackson, MP), Ian Richardson (of "House of Cards" fame) as Marat, and Patrick Magee (Clockwork Orange) as de Sade.

As the title implies, the film is entirely a play-within-a-play where most cast members depict both a character from the French Revolution as well as an insane asylum inmate playing that character. While the film (like the later comedy-drama about deSade, "Quills") addresses censorship, it is primarily concerned with a debate between Marat as a sort of representative of revolutionary radical communism, and de Sade as a nihilistic existentialist frustrated with his own, and society's, violently cruel urges, as well as the futility of revolutionary action to improve mankind.

Despite this very heavy and multi-layered topic, the film also manages to be both sexy and funny in regular intervals. Great moments include a comic "orgy" scene where the inmates sing "What's the point of a revolution without general copulation?" in a round like "row-row-row your boat" and mime a vigorously improbable group sex event fully clothed, Magee's various speeches on the nature of man: "What we do, is but a shadow of what we want to do...", Richardson's unblinking intensity as he waits for the knife to "kill" him, and Jackson, doing a little dance trying to capture the knife from de Sade while he teases her with it in an effort to get her in his arms. Add to this the delightful theatricality and musical numbers (yes there are many musical numbers!) and it is little wonder that the play on which the film is based has regularly been performed all around the world ever since it was written.

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.

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.

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

In an insane asylum, the Marquis de Sade directs Jean Paul Marat's last days through a theater play. The actors are the patients.

Did something like this actually happen? I could imagine the Maquis de Sade putting this sort of thing together, because what else is he going to do with his time? But did they actually allow this? And, of course, the real inmates could not possibly have been such good actors and singers... could they? As others have noted, this film can be enjoyed by anyone but probably has much more significance for those who grasp the politics and philosophy of the French Revolution. To try to fully comprehend the class distinctions and other angles without some background would be a challenge. To say I fully grasped the competing views of the inmates, Sade and the warden would be a lie.