La Vénus à la fourrure (2013)
Directed by Roman Polanski

Film Review

A Roman Polanski film invariably offers something akin to a Narnia experience.  A seemingly banal yet strangely alluring opening, as inviting as the doors of a wardrobe, draws us into a realm of the imagination that becomes weirder and weirder by the minute.  We are disturbed, perhaps frightened by what we see, and yet, like the brave child heroes of C.S. Lewis's famous series of novels, we have no desire to retrace our steps and return to the world of everyday experience.  What Polanski shows us is a distorted version of our own reality, a kind of burlesque horror show that exposes the more perverse aspects of human relationships, and we emerge realising that the real world is not so far from the dreamlike fantasy we have just experienced.  This is true of all of Roman Polanski's films but none more so than his latest self-indulgent excursion into psychosexual absurdity, La Vénus à la fourrure.

The most improbable thing about this film is that it did not spring from Polanski's fertile imagination but is in fact adapted from the stage play Venus in Fur by the American playwright David Ives, which was a massive hit on Broadway in 2011.  The play was itself inspired by a 1870 novella, Venus im Pelz, by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, a liberated Austrian writer from whose name the word masochism derives.  Polanski's film is the fifth to be inspired by Sacher-Masoch's book - others include Jesus Franco's Venus in Furs (1969) and Seduction: The Cruel Woman (1985) by Elfi Mikesch and Monika Treut.

Polanski may not have originated La Vénus à la fourrure but it manages to be the most perfect of distillation of his oeuvre.  Its central theme, domination of one human being by another, is one that has figured heavily in the writer-director's films right from his remarkable debut feature, Knife in the Water (1962).  In Polanski's films, the prisoner-gaoler scenario often crops up, with two very different characters locked together in a relationship of mutual dependency, and the interesting thing is that we can never be sure who has the upper hand in the relationship.  It is a situation which Polanski may himself have been very familiar with, as a film director working with headstrong and seductive actors.

When the two characters in La Vénus à la fourrure are introduced to us, it is clear who is the master and who is the underdog.  The self-important theatre director Thomas looks down on the wannabe actress Vanda like a zoologist casting a supercilious glance over something several rungs beneath him on the evolutionary ladder.  The common, unkempt, vulnerable Vanda allows Thomas to assert his male authority, and he takes a sadistic pleasure in humiliating her.  But then, slowly, the table begins to turn and it is Thomas who becomes Vanda's plaything.  Watching the transformation of both characters as the game of domination is played out is fascinating and disturbing, and we cannot be sure whether Thomas is genuinely being controlled by Vanda or whether he has a darker purpose in seeming to submit to her will.  Who is manipulating who?  Who is the victim in this little charade - Thomas, Vanda, or both?  Or is it, us, the audience, who is being deluded and controlled - by an unhinged filmmaker revelling in the power of his art...?

It is telling that Polanski should cast his own wife, Emmanuelle Seigner, in the role of the mysterious and seductive Vanda.  It is even more telling that Mathieu Amalric, the actor chosen to play opposite Seigner, is made up to be a spitting image of Polanski as he appeared in his mid-30s.  You suspect that the director is playing out his own personal fantasy, perhaps in an attempt to exorcise demons that have long plagued him (as is so evidently the case in some of his previous films, most notably The Pianist).  Seigner and Amalric - who had appeared together previously in Julian Schnabel's Le Scaphandre et le papillon (2007) - are well-matched as cunning opponents in a long, drawn-out psychological duel, constantly taking us by surprise as the balance of power shifts from one character to another, taking us deeper and deeper into the dark realm of human desire.

The story is one that Polanski has told, in various guises, many times before.  It is closest to his early black comedy Cul-de-sac (1966), the twisted relationship between a dysfunctional husband and wife (Donald Pleasence and Françoise Dorléac) in a remote setting echoing that which Amalric and Signer enact in Polanski's latest film.  By reducing the dramatis personae to just two characters and confining the action to one location (a stage set and its environs in a deserted theatre), Polanski finally has the opportunity to dispense with superfluity and focus on what is so evidently the most intriguing aspect of human nature - the desire to dominate and be dominated.  Along the way, he carves out one of his most enthralling and unsettling films - a trip to Narnia you will not regret.

Film Synopsis

Alone in a Paris theatre, Thomas laments the fact that he has not been able to find an actress for the lead role of his next play.  None of the candidates he has auditioned so far has what he is looking for to carry the part.  Thomas is on the point of giving up when Vanda suddenly appears, like a whirlwind in human form.  Vanda is everything that the director detests.  She is vulgar, empty-headed but determined to land the role.  With nothing to lose, Thomas decides to give Vanda a chance to audition for the part and is surprised by the transformation that takes place under his eyes.  Not only does the actress have all the accessories needed for the role, she seems to have a perfect understanding of it and knows all her lines by heart.  As the audition drags on, Thomas's interest in Vanda gradually turns into obsession...