Roman Polanski‘s films are never simple. ‘La Vénus à la fourrure‘ (English title is ‘Venus in furs‘) is the adaptation of a Tony Award winning play by David Ives based on a novel by 19th century Austrian writer Leopold von Sacher-Masoch , which in turn is inspired by a famous Renaissance painting. von Sacher-Masoch‘s novel also has at least ten other film adaptations or films inspired by it – most of them with more or less erotic themes and flavors – plus a song by Velvet Underground. There is eroticism in Polanski‘s film too – refined, innuendo, perverse – but that is only one of the film’s many themes. Only two characters appear on screen, the only human presences, for that matter, in the entire film. The setting is a theater on a very rainy day in Paris, but it might as well be in a post-apocalyptic world where there are only two survivors left, the film’s heroes, a man and a woman. A power play takes place between them, a confrontation between the sexes, a dialogue in which the roles change just as the theater-life perspective changes. Like many of Polanski‘s films, the biography of the complicated and controversial director is not alien to the subject of the film and the way it is approached.
The story takes place at the end of a day of auditions for the lead role – of Wanda – in a stage adaptation of von Sacher-Masoch‘s novel. Everyone has left and playwright-director Thomas is preparing to turn off the lights in the theater when Vanda appears. She is a candidate who claims to be late for the audition even though her name does not appear on the list of candidate actors for the day. She convinces Thomas to give her a chance. At first sight this looks like a total mismatch, but after the first lines the director realizes that Vanda-Wanda is not only a formidable candidate but also perfectly masters and understands his play and the character she is acting. Thomas and Vanda engage in the game and what happens on stage interacts with what happens in life. The novel’s characters take over the actors, the stage director – candidate actress relationship is erased to give way to the novel’s passionate and ambiguous drama and power struggle.
What Roman Polanski manages to do in the closed space of a stage and a theater hall is amazing. The story unfolds as a permanent game between reality and appearances. Theater in film has been present in many other films, but here Polanski succeeds in recreating that feeling of direct relationship between spectators and actors that exists in theater but is very rare in films. Spectators are not only absorbed in the action, but are constantly wondering what is happening on stage, whether the lines spoken belong to the play or to life, whether the characters are from the book or from reality. Emmanuelle Seigner who is Polanski‘s wife plays Wanda, and Mathieu Amalric is cast as Thomas, who is not only a formidable actor and seems to have been born to play this role, but also bears a striking physical resemblance to Polanski. ‘La Vénus à la fourrure‘ is a strange and interesting film, ambiguous and captivating, intelligent and sophisticated – one of the best late-career films of a great director.