Venus in Fur (2013)
French arthouse gem starring Emmanuelle Seigner — electric, hypnotic, transgressive. Polanski at his sharpest. The full seduction, uncut.
One late actress, one smug director and one stormy Paris night turn a simple audition into a wickedly funny duel of sex, power and surrender.
Thomas is alone in a shabby Paris theatre after a miserable day auditioning actresses for his adaptation of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s notorious 1870 tale of desire and submission. He is tired, arrogant and already on the phone telling his fiancée that no modern woman has the intelligence, breeding or sensual authority to play his heroine. Then Vanda bursts in from the rain, hopelessly late and apparently all wrong: loud, vulgar, scattered and squeezed into a trashy black leather outfit beneath her coat. Thomas tries to get rid of her, but she badgers him into one quick reading. The moment it begins, the dizzy nuisance disappears and a poised, commanding woman takes her place. Vanda knows the entire script, has brought period costumes and props, understands the theatre’s lighting controls and appears to know Thomas’s work—and his private...
desires—far better than she reasonably should. Fascinated, he reads the male role opposite her, and the audition gradually becomes a full rehearsal of the play’s strange romance between Severin, a man who wants to be enslaved, and Wanda, the beautiful aristocrat he invites to dominate him. The two keep slipping in and out of character, arguing over whether the story is passionate literature, male fantasy or dressed-up humiliation. Vanda challenges Thomas’s interpretation, rearranges scenes and steadily takes charge, while his professional detachment begins to crumble into attraction, defensiveness and obsession. Soon she is directing the director, probing his relationship with his fiancée and exposing how closely his respectable exterior resembles the submissive hero he has written. When they exchange parts, the game becomes even more intimate and disorienting: author becomes actor, employer becomes applicant, and the man who believed he controlled every word finds himself following Vanda’s cues. Roman Polanski keeps the film playful, cerebral and darkly erotic, using sharp dialogue, sudden changes of voice and small shifts in body language to make reality and performance almost impossible to separate. It is theatrical by design and very talk-heavy, but Seigner and Mathieu Amalric keep tightening the screws until the empty theatre feels like a private dungeon built out of words.
The film belongs to contemporary Paris, yet the play within it evokes the aristocratic world of late-19th-century Europe, complete with fur, formal manners, contracts of submission and forbidden appetites. It was filmed inside Paris’s Théâtre Récamier, with the Théâtre Hébertot used for the exterior. Rain, thunder, abandoned scenery and the cavernous auditorium give it a lonely after-hours vibe, as if these two people have stepped outside ordinary life and into a dangerous fantasy.
Emmanuelle Seigner is the whole show: tall, blonde, leggy and magnificently assured, shifting from bedraggled comic chaos to cool, imperious femininity in a heartbeat. Her leather bustier, short skirt, stockings, thigh-high boots, collar and fur provide plenty for the male eye, but her real allure lies in the way she controls the room—and Thomas—with her voice, gaze and intelligence. Despite its kinky subject, there is no actual sex and no nudity; the heat is psychological, built from costumes, commands, humiliation, role-play and the delicious suggestion that Vanda may be far more than an actress looking for work.
An Enigmatic French theatre actress auditions for the lead role in ‘Venus in Fur’ and its Brilliant director, & things take an unexpected detour into D&S.
Sign in to comment
The same account you use to watch films.