Le Procès d'Oscar Wilde

In 1895 Oscar Wilde – an exuberant dandy living up to his aesthetic ideals – had reached the height of his literary career. In the days following the opening of his play The Importance of Being Ernest at the St James’s Theatre the Marquess of Queensberry sent Wilde at his club’s address a card in which he claimed that the latter had been “posing as a sodomite.” By disclosing through a derogatory public statement the nature of the bond between the author and the Marquess’s son – Lord Alfred Douglas – the Marquess spurred Wilde to sue him for libel. Queensberry was thus sent to appear before the Criminal Court in Old Bailey to be judged in a case due to start a month later, on April 2nd. In the interim, confident he would win the case, Wilde treated himself to a vacation with his lover. Meanwhile Queensberry had spies infiltrate the London homosexual scene to gather information about Wilde’s private life.[...]
[...] All statements by Oscar Wilde and by lawyers related in this film are excerpted from the minutes of the trial. They are but the ipsissima verba of the very last play written by the author. A play in which he merely wrote the foreword