Venus in Fur (2014)

Rating: 5/5

What a welcome back to the cinema. After an incredibly demanding few months, I returned today to my beloved Cinema City to witness the latest masterpiece of probably my favourite director, Roman Polanski. Right from Repulsion and Rosemary’s Baby to Tess and of course The Pianist, Polanski has always demonstrated keen insight into his audience’s emotions and expectations, the latter of which he usually seems to defy. This year, we have the beautiful Venus in Fur, which is based upon the play which is based upon the novel by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch (whose practices were apparently on par with the Marquis de Sade – hence Sado-Masochism).

Admittedly, through some apparent mishap, I was until today unfamiliar with either the play or the novel, but had brief understandings of masochism. This movie, which works entirely as a captivating two-hander, gave me a very detailed idea, as it handles not only the story, but its characters explore their characters’ complex minds and thought processes.

Taking place as a single, feature-length ‘scene’, it opens with an inspired shot of a long, tree-lined pavement in Paris during a violent thunderstorm, and the pavement creates an endless  grey tornado into oblivion. The camera then pans to the theatre (the H is missing from the run-down sign), and zaps through the doors, and we are introduced to Thomas (Mathieu Amalric), a first time writer-director, who has penned an adaptation of von Masoch’s novel for the stage, and has grown infuriated by the torrent of brainless bimbo actresses without any depth or emotional understanding auditioning to be his leading lady.

Then, in a rather Educating Rita-esque opening, in swaggers a dishevelled, wind-swept actress (Emmanuelle Seigner), to audition. She is loud, colloquial and self-professedly ‘stupid’, and she is too late. It’s the middle of the night and Thomas has to get home to his fiancée, but the actress is insistent to say the least. She has brought costumes, claims she knows the part well, and when that doesn’t work, she cries. Eventually, she convinces the exasperated Thomas to let her read three pages.

From the very first word of the first page, she is a different person. She is amazing. This is the first of many times the actress Vanda, whose name is the same as that of the character she is auditioning for, effortlessly snaps from ego to alter-ego. Despite insisting he is no actor, Thomas is so attracted by her performance that he soon seems to embody the character speaking the words he wrote. Vanda abruptly snaps back upon the three-page mark, but now Thomas is intrigued, and he wants to continue.

What follows is a paralleling of the play into the reality of the audition. The plot sees beautiful young innocent Vanda propositioned into a dominant relationship by Severin, who has had a fetish for fur and humiliation since a childhood punishment by his aunt. But when Vanda relents and has him become her ‘slave’, she becomes corrupted by his influences, and becomes more than he could ever handle.

Throughout, I couldn’t help but notice certain similarities between Venus and Polanski’s earlier erotic melodrama Bitter Moon, which also starred his lovely wife Emmanuelle Seigner in the role of the femme fatale. That story showed us bitter old paraplegic Oscar (Peter Coyote) and his eye-candy wife Mimi (Seigner), who meet an uptight British couple with a frigid relationship (Hugh Grant and Kristin Scott Thomas) on a cruise, and Oscar relates to the husband in a series of sessions, the story of how his and Mimi’s relationship started out as absolute true love in Paris, but how they reached ‘sexual bankruptcy’ after escalating their sadomasochistic interests as far as they would go. Then came the downfall of their relationship, which involved two-way game-playing, cruelty and ultimate peculiar happiness.

Bitter Moon was melodramatic and at times uncomfortably laughable in its depictions of S&M, but it was utterly captivating and unapologetically insightful towards how humans really think. There was a particular scene in that movie, in which Mimi childishly begs Oscar to let her shave him with a cut-throat razor, and when she cuts his neck, she takes a tongueful of blood – shaving foam and all – and they stare at each other in the bathroom mirror. There is a look Seigner still masters after twenty-something years. That of the foxlike femme fatale, whose motives are questionable and indefinite until the last minutes.

Although there was initially apparent doubt towards Seigner’s capability when Polanski cast her in a couple of his earlier movies, she proved herself. Here, she reinforces herself. Not only does she have an exquisite body for a 47-year old mother of two, but she has utter power over the screen and the situation. Even when Thomas is screaming at Vanda, calling her every name under the sun for questioning the morals behind his content, which he sees as ‘demolition of the material’, she is absolutely collected, and does not flinch. She is never intimidated.

The main attraction of this movie is the insatiable power play between…well, four people really. There is Vanda the actress, and her character Vanda, and there is Thomas, and his character Severin. Mostly by Vanda’s prompt, they break character regularly, erupting into argument, flirtation, seduction, and many many unsure scenarios in between. At first we wonder if anybody knows what is going on. Then Vanda reveals she does: she isn’t actually ignorant to the novel; she isn’t actually ‘stupid’; she has been playing us. After these initial deceptions, what is anyone to expect?

The important quality that the actors and director get so right is the blurring between ego and alter-ego. Vanda may speak the scripted lines, but she will throw in gestures or ideas that are–original. Eventually she and her character dominate Thomas and his to the very limit, to the point where reality must return. But we are still not sure just what that reality is.

This movie is superb. Acting by Seigner and Amalric is absolutely sterling, direction is precise and artful as ever, visuals are dark, rich, moody, reminding me somewhat of those in Louis Malle’s Pretty Baby, and there is a fascinating use of sound. As Vanda and Thomas act out mimed stage directions, the appropriate sounds of the non-present objects are audible. The rattling of a teacup on a saucer, the stirring of the spoon, the tearing of paper. It has a spookily beautiful effect. Musical scoring is equally strong, particularly in the dramatic, forté ending.

Without wanting to spoil a very spectacular ending, the question of the movie’s message must be addressed. Throughout the play, Vanda criticises its supposedly misogynist ideas and claims it is sexist. The fate of Thomas puts these issues up for discussion. Are we to agree ultimately that the play, and Thomas’ own mind, is a perverted display of misogyny, or that these ideas were in fact correct? I really cannot say anymore on what is a very moral-questioning film, for fear of spoiling an ending which left me in awe, and with a slight smile on my face.