Captivating two-hander
THIS WELL-ACTED, largely riveting two-hander may be considered rather stagey, set as it is in an empty theatre where a director is running auditions for his play.
To be fair, it is the big screen adaptation of a Broadway play by the little-known David Ives who must be thanking his lucky stars that Roman Polanski picked up the script one day, translated it into French and decided to take it global.
The film has since scooped awards at the French Oscars and was nominated for the top prize at Cannes.
The play-within-a-play, basedon-a-play, has ‘‘meta’’ written all over it. Mathieu Amalric ( The Diving Bell and the Butterfly and latterly The Grand Budapest Hotel) can’t help but look like a young Polanski in the role of the beleaguered theatre director who is producing his own play, which is in turn based on an Austrian novel about masochism. As he laments the paucity of an appropriate female actress to play the lead of Wanda, a spirited woman (named Vanda) arrives at the theatre and pushes her way into an audition. She is played by Polanski’s off-screen wife, French actress Emmanuelle Seigner (who also played against Amalric in Diving Bell. Are you keeping up?).
Vanda and Thomas engage in a witty, intellectual dance of words as they read through the play, flitting effortlessly between their characters and riding a rollercoaster of emotions as the onion layers of motivation are peeled away. Inevitably, things get pretty dark.
Polanski’s previous feature film was 2011’s Carnage, the adaptation of an award-winning play (that one originally written in French) which saw four Oscarcalibre actors – Kate Winslet, Jodie Foster, Christophe Waltz and John Reilly – holed up in a Brooklyn apartment, shouting at each other over a domestic incident.
Both films boast Polanski’s acuity with attaining great performances out of claustrophobic locations and provocative dialogue.