“My one and only noble point may be found in my bodily appendage, whom I will consult democratically as he is rather whimsical.”

Flinthart’s rating: I’m giving it seven out of 10 talking penis puppets.

Flinthart’s review: No, dammit. I am NOT back. I’m just… look, I watched a weird-arse film and I’m probably gonna watch some more because that’s how I roll. And I write about stuff. So here we are.

But I am NOT back. I’m just gonna do some drive-by stuff. You know: cruise in late at night, windows down, bass thumping. Stick my laptop out the window and spray the scenery leaving carnage in my wake. Yeah. That’s how it’s gonna be.

So the movie is a thing called Marquis, and it’s French. The thing about French films is they can do a lot of weirdness, and the Frenchies just shrug the shoulders, readjust the beret, and jam the baguette farther into their bowl of coffee. Hitting up a French movie on account of weirdness is a pretty low bar. If you’re measuring by that metric, you gotta remember the Frenchies invented the metric system, right? Meaning, reviewing a French film for being weird, it had better be seriously weird.

And Marquis has that covered. This 1989 movie directed by Henri Xhonneux (seriously. And no, I do NOT know how to pronounce “Xhonneux.” It looks like the sort of noise people make when they’re hawking up a particularly large and gelatinous loogie. So maybe that’s how you should pronounce it. Or not. Now excuse me, I gotta open the window to get rid of the terrifying loogie I accidentally summoned to the back of my throat) is nominally about one of the periods in which the infamous (legendary!) Marquis de Sade was imprisoned and then committed to an asylum.

Yes, THAT Marquis de Sade.

Oh — and the entire cast wears marvelously detailed animatronic animal-head masks. And the Marquis’ best buddy and main advisor in the film is his very large puppet-animated talking penis. Which is named Colin. For… reasons. Also, Colin is probably the author of the Marquis’ well-known array of violently kinky works of fiction, but having no hands of his own he has to dic(k)tate (ha! See what I did there?) while the Marquis writes it all down.

And after that? There’s really not much more to say. The story itself is weirdly soap-opera, with a cow-woman falling for the dog-headed Marquis but actually bearing the bastard child of the King. Meanwhile, the rat-thing jailer has a huge gay man-crush on the Marquis, but Colin won’t agree to get involved. A couple of prison cells away, another pair of animal-dudes are carrying out a fairly ludicrous jailbreak attempt, abetted by some largely incompetent revolutionary types. And another pair of animal dudes who are not prisoners decide to put the cow-girl in with de Sade so they can make it look like he was the one who impregnated her, thus saving the King from all kinds of disgrace and a really messy throne-inheritance problem. Except that the Marquis is a dog-mask guy, and luckily we’re spared the director’s vision of some sort of hybrid cow-dog person when cow-woman gives birth during a tense phase of the film to a baby in an iron mask. (Cop THAT, Alexandre Dumas!)

I’m gonna say you should watch this film. Yeah, it’s in French and all, but even a dubbed version won’t hurt because the shiny, complex animal-head masks mean that synchronisation is just as crap whether you get French, English, or even Chinese dialogue. (But I bet you can’t get a Chinese version. The Chinese are way too sensible for this kind of thing.)

Production values are high. The costumes and masks are amazing. The filmwork is quality. Who cares if the storylines are crossed up, and there’s no driving central narrative arc? French films are first and foremost about style, and Marquis has absolute buckets of that.

PS: I’m really not back.

Intermission!

• All the female characters in this movie are named for headline-title characters from the Marquis de Sade’s books. Justine, Juliette, etc. Obviously, somebody was a fan.
• The film ends with Colin packing his, uh, bags, and leaving the Marquis so as to pursue a life of adventure elsewhere. Maybe it was meant to lead into a sequel? Oh, how I hope that never got made.