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“Venus in Fur” is a nesting-doll puzzle well before a single frame of it is seen. The film is an adaptation of David Ives’s Tony-winning play, which was itself an iteration of a salacious book by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch (yep, masochism’s namesake). The lead character, playwright and director Thomas (Mathieu Amalric) is also crafting a play based on Sacher-Masoch’s material, and his lead character, Severin, soon becomes an extension of himself. Got all that?
“Venus in Fur” is also directed by Roman Polanski, who seems to be using Almaric as his own personal doppelganger, not least because the film’s female lead, Emmanuelle Seigner, is Polanski’s wife. Seigner plays Vanda, a mysterious actress who shows up at a Paris theater at the end of what proves a fruitless audition day for Thomas, and who — wouldn’t you know it — shares the name of the female lead in the playwright’s latest work.
All of these interweaving, meta elements help “Venus in Fur” amount to a chic mystery of near-countless layers, with lines between fiction and reality, humor and anger, even male and female, consistently blurring. The material is an ideal fit for Polanski, who once again proves he’s among the greatest directors ever to orchestrate grand drama in tight spaces. There’s a certain claustrophobia about this movie — and the texts that inspired it — that tightens the vise that is Vanda’s growing dominance over Thomas.
Did Seigner somehow, by extension, wind up dominating her husband during production? It’s one of countless questions with which “Venus in Fur” leaves one, and that, of course, is the ultimate appeal of the cryptic film. Polanski’s interpretation amps up the saucy challenges imposed on the viewer, who’s tasked to navigate a hall of mirrors where nothing is certain. Well, maybe one thing is certain: “Venus in Fur” is one of the most oddly satisfying flicks of the season.
Venus in Fur
NR
Three-and-a-half reels out of four
Opens in limited release tomorrow
Recommended Rental
The Grand Budapest Hotel
R
Now available
Wes Anderson’s greatest film sees him broadening his horizons to an international scale — sort of. The master director explores familiar components of European history (namely World War II), but it’s all still within the director’s trademark world of concocted whimsy. Ralph Fiennes is extraordinary as an eccentric hotelier, and he’s in the impressive company of Bill Murray, Jeff Goldblum, Jude Law and others, who populate various threads of Anderson’s epic narrative.
Contact the South Philly Review at editor@southphillyreview.com.
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