This basic plot is, more or less, historical fact. What follows is very much an invention of screenwriter Doug Wright, from whose play the film is adapted, and director Kaufman, who have constructed an allegory for the debates surrounding censorship and of the hypocrisies that any one position can contain. The Marquis refuses to be silenced, despite ever more demeaning treatment and is, thus, the apparent defender of his right to free speech, no matter how offensive to others. Yet time and again he is revealed to be a rather pathetic fantasist hiding behind a mask of outrageousness. The Abbé's honourable principles are exposed as pieties when the going gets rough and his accommodation of Royer-Collard becomes collaboration. Most ironically, in a narrative that reflects the Marquis' own style of saucy romp escalating into violent frenzy, Royer-Collard emerges as a Sadean hero. A vicious authoritarian who lives the sort of life that the Marquis can only write about, he brutally triumphs over his opponents by exploiting their weaknesses.

So there is enough going on in Quills to satisfy the intellectually curious who don't have any qualms about art playing fast and loose with history (unlike some of the, by now de rigueur, articles penned by historians who feel compelled to point out that It Didn't Happen That Way). But does it make for a good movie? It's hit and miss. The actors don't disappoint in dream roles. Geoffrey Rush gives the sort of performance that is habitually described as "brave" - critic-speak for being naked and looking unattractive. He is certainly in tune with the tone of the film, at first impish and ripe, latterly strung-out and desolate. Phoenix is cornering the market in sympathetic losers and Caine's Royer-Collard is a memorable addition to his recently acquired portfolio of scumbags. Best of the bunch is Winslet, surely the best young actress now working in film. Amidst the campery and villainous sneering, hers is a naturalistic, if full-blooded, performance that ensures the tragic dénouement carries an emotional charge it might otherwise lack.

Formally, however, the film's a bit of a mess. The lurch from romp to tragedy, if not horror, while perhaps faithful to the source material, doesn't quite come off. The ghost of the Carry On films haunts the early stages, all fruity eye-rolling and double entendres. Crucially, as the film turns steadily more demanding on both the intellect and the eye (it's surprisingly bloodthirsty in places), it struggles to shake off the earlier high spirits and the audience is left floundering just when you need a hand. Worse, considering Kaufman's earlier work (particularly Invasion of the Body Snatchers, 1978 and The Right Stuff, 1983), Quills never escapes its theatrical origins to pull its weight as a work of cinema (the declamatory style of much of the dialogue not helping much). Although the small number of sets used are impressive, the bland cinematography sadly fails to take any advantage. The thrilling, fluid camera that stalked the dungeons and palaces of Shekhar Kapur's Elizabeth (1997), for example, is absent here, with the blood stirring only during one or two set-pieces (especially the Marquis' final story, whispered through the asylum walls by the inmates, that ends in bloodshed).

A mixed bag then. Quite fun, and never less than watchable, Quills is so technically and visually unambitious that one might question the point of making a film of it at all were the issues aired throughout it not as topical and pertinent in the twenty-first century as they were in the nineteenth.

Reviewed by John Atkinson