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Imagination, Obsession Sets The Stage In 'Venus In Fur'

IFC Films
Mathieu Amalric and Emmanuelle Seigneur in Roman Polanski's 'Venus in Fur.'

It’s not unusual for filmmakers as they age to grow interested in theater. Jean Renoir did it toward the end of his career. Ingmar Bergman’s last major film, Fanny and Alexander, takes place in a theatrical family.

Now 81-year-old Roman Polanski, who has made films about Satanic cults, murderous insanity, Nazi atrocities and other terrors, has directed and written Venus in Fur, based on the play by David Ives.

The film has two characters, and they never leave the confines of a theater. The setting gives the movie more room than you might think and makes little things count. When the actress puts on a scarf, it changes the whole piece; a move from the audience to the stage or vice versa stirs up the drama.

Inside the theater, you know you’re in a space where imagination rules, and normal realities do not.

The story is simple, on the surface. An actress, played by Emmanuelle Seigneur, shows up late for an audition and tries to convince the director (Mathieu Amalric) to give her a chance. The film cuts deeper than that, of course. Polanski begins the film with a shot moving down the center of a wide city boulevard and then turning into a theater with a couple sets of doors and signs that say things like “fantastic” on the marquee – all to make you know that the picture has left standard realism behind.

The director of the play is tired and frustrated by a parade of young actresses he thinks are brainless and inept. He wants to go home, but Vanda persists. She too is tired – she’s been to too many auditions and told she’s too short, too tall, too young, or too old. She has a costume – black with indications of S&M about it. But he wants to go; she cries; his phone goes off blaring out Wagner.

Unlike the other actresses, Vanda already knows the script by heart. And Vanda is no shrinking violet. From the start she bullies Thomas the director. She challenges him. She goads him to read a scene with her; she even resets the lights on stage, and pretty soon she lets Thomas know that she thinks the play is pornographic and built on male fantasies about dominating women.

As the film goes on, Vanda and Thomas go in and out of the play. In the middle of a tense scene in the play, one of them will pull out to direct how the other acts their part. They also shift parts; they trade genders. They act out relationships between themselves in some kind of actuality, but also within the play that may or not be staged in this theater. Reality takes many forms, none of them stable or fixed.

Roman Polanski made his first masterpiece, Knife in the Water, in 1962; he’s been one of the world’s major filmmakers for over 50 years. He’s terrific with the space of the theater. Behind or beyond the actors, the film shows that there’s empty room that hasn’t been defined yet. There’s no scenery, so the stage is ready to be re-created in the imagination. Polanski also shows what acting can do to a space. Vanda changes from her S&M black leather into a 19th century dress, sashays past Thomas, and it feels as if the entire affair has been moved to another time.

The ideas about theater, film and actuality behind Venus in Fur aren’t revolutionary. Roman Polanski is hardly the first film director to make a movie about how directors are manipulative or cruel, and how they get locked into their private and perverse fantasies. But Venus in Fur is still lively and even thrilling. When the characters flip in and out of their various realities, you might feel astonished, and to see so much imagination released in such an apparently simple film is always satisfying.

But not simple.

Howie Movshovitz came to Colorado in 1966 as a VISTA Volunteer and never wanted to leave. After three years in VISTA, he went to graduate school at CU-Boulder and got a PhD in English, focusing on the literature of the Middle Ages. In the middle of that process, though (and he still loves that literature) he got sidetracked into movies, made three shorts, started writing film criticism and wound up teaching film at the University of Colorado-Denver. He continues to teach in UCD’s College of Arts & Media.
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