Oscar winner Geoffrey Rush gives a tour-de-force performance as history's most infamous sexual adventurer, the Marquis de Sade, a nobleman with a literary flair. The Marquis lives in a madhouse where a beautiful laundry maid (Kate Winslet) smuggles his erotic stories to a printer, defying orders form the asylum's resident priest (Joaquin Phoenix). The titillating passages whip all of France into sexual frenzy, until a fiercely conservative doctor (Michael Caine) tries to put an end to the fun, inadvertently stoking the excitement to a fever pitch.
