Marquis

Imprisoned in the Bastille for a minor act of blasphemy, the Marquis navigates lust, censorship, and the chaos of pre-revolutionary France. Through his wild imagination, he escapes into scandalous tales he writes down on scraps of paper. But the idea of a real escape begins to take shape when his cellmates start planning their breakout to join the revolutionary movement beyond the Bastille walls.

This truly astonishing film – loosely based on the life of the notorious Marquis de Sade – is like nothing you’ve ever seen before. The characters in the story are all animals: dogs, cows, hens, rats etc. But this is not animation. The cast are played by real actors in specially created life-sized heads of whichever animal they are portraying: the Marquis is a cheery spaniel, the naive Justine is a heifer, the dominatrix Juliette is a mare and the head of the notorious Bastille prison is a sexually rapacious cockerel.

And, as though that wasn’t enough, the Marquis’ constant companion in his grim prison cell is his oversized talking penis, which pops out of his trousers to hold long conversations with him about the state of the world. Visually wild and totally unhinged, this underground cult classic is not for the faint of heart.