Two tales of temptation
Polanski does domination while Von Trier lets loose the dogs of lust
ONE always feels disorientated when coming out of a dark cinema to find it is still daylight. In the opening and closing bars of Venus in Fur, director Roman Polanski uses this dislocation on screen. The camera’s eye takes us along a deserted Paris street (the streets of Paris are often empty in films, although never in real life). We stop outside the door of a run-down theatre, on which is a poster for the musical Stagecoach and a note about auditions for Venus in Fur.
Three Freudian sets of double doors open into the claustrophobic inner sanctum, where playwright Thomas Novachek (Mathieu Amalric, who looks like a young Polanski, except taller) is on stage with his back to us. He is ranting on the phone about how no actress he has auditioned can say the word “incredible” properly. Saying it in French is admittedly much more difficult than saying it in English.
Polanski has stayed true to the Broadway play by David Ives, which in turn was based on the 1870 Austrian novella Venus in Furs by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch (who gave his name to masochism and whose great-great-niece happens to be Marianne Faithfull, which is entirely irrelevant here). There are only two actors and all the action takes place in the theatre, mostly on stage. The only difference is that the film version is in French.
The person with whom we have entered the theatre turns out to be a bedraggled woman wearing a raincoat and a dog collar. She strips off her outer gear in front of a protesting Novachek, who barely pauses in his protests when he sees the corset and stockings beneath her coat. She wants to audition, even though she is hours late. He doesn’t want her to, although he pauses for a little longer when she introduces herself as Vanda, the name of the character in his play, the ideal woman he cannot cast.
This Vanda is tattooed and foulmouthed, wears too much eyeshadow and chews gum with her mouth open. She is not the prim goddess of the text he is adapting, but she nonetheless forces him to let her read and makes him play the other part — a repressed writer desperate to be enslaved and humiliated by a cruel woman in a fur coat.
Thus begins a game of psychosexual politics in which power changes hands as frequently as Vanda changes outfits. She has brought a vintage gown with her and in it she transforms into the genteel Vanda of the play, leaving Novachek stammering with shock.
To his amazement, she says “incredible” beautifully, though she gets confused between “ambivalent” and “ambigu” (French for ambiguous). As they continue switching between the play, the book and “reality”, he is stupefied into a state of crippling desire, especially when zipping a pair of long leather boots onto Vanda’s legs.
As Vanda, Polanski’s wife Emmanuelle Seigner is brash and blowsy one minute, tenderly solicitous the next. No longer the ingénue who seduced Hugh Grant in Bitter Moon, the older Seigner is “voluptuous and terrifying” — words used by the character in the novel within the play within the film to describe his aunt, who aroused in him a love of fur and pain.
Vanda turns Novachek’s play and his universe upside down — at one point making crafty use of a fake cactus from the Stagecoach set — when she demonstrates that the giving away of power is in itself a form of domination.
The film is suggestive rather than explicit. A scene where Vanda decides to be the goddess Venus (draped in a knitted shawl which even the audience starts to believe is real sable after both actors have stroked it a few times) is played for laughs rather than thrills. She ad-libs her lines in German-accented French, which an Englishspeaking audience might miss but for the generous subtitles, which speak of zese and zose zorts of zings.
Who knew Polanski could be funny? This film is. It is also thoughtful, surprising, angry, provocative, perplexing, enlightening and very, very clever. — Sue de Groot LS