Roman Polanski’s film adaptation of the David Ives play Venus in Fur has so many layers that it’s like a wedding cake for an S&M couple: dense and towering and painfully delicious. All of these layers hum simultaneously, and following them all becomes nearly impossible in a single viewing. Better to just got swept up in its rivers of words, its ocean of chatter, which spills with elegant passion from its characters (and characters within characters), and to think about the copious subtext later.
Like Ives’ source material, Polanski’s film is what playwrights call a two-hander: a script for only two actors. It’s set in a single location, a faintly gothic and romantically vintage theater, and it begins at the end of a fruitless audition. Thomas (Mathieu Amalric), a theater director, has spent the day attempting to cast a female lead in his adaptation of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s controversial novella Venus in Furs, which gave us the name “sadomasochism” and helped elevate perversion to art.
It seems to have been a wasted day, until one final auditioner, Vanda (Emmanuelle Seigner), stumbles in from the pelting rain, speaking like a ditz and wearing an inappropriate leather bustier and dog collar. Thomas would like to return home to his fiancée, but Vanda convinces him to let her read; she’s even brought along a seemingly endless bag containing costumes and props for her character, many of them authentic to the play’s late 19th-century setting.
What happens next shouldn’t be spoiled, but suffice it to say that it’s far from a normal audition. Thomas and Vanda read the play together, gracefully slipping in and out of their characters, arguing about the play’s meaning while deeply exploring its deviant content.
Even though I’ve Venus in Fur onstage, the story’s many transformations and inversions remain full of striking surprises that are both witty and disturbing —probably because this version appears to be more informed by Polanski than by Ives (and is shot in French, no less). The play’s Broadway production introduced the world to the phenomenal ingénue Nina Arianda, who played Vanda, at least in the initial scenes, with a dopily lovable charm and an adolescent naïveté.
For his movie version, Polanski cast his wife, the 48-year-old Seigner, who immediately establishes a different dynamic through her sexual forwardness and decades of life experience. And for Thomas, he cast an actor, in Amalric, who looks deliberately like a younger Roman Polanski. As their conversations escalate, and their sexual tensions accelerate, and their ulterior motives overtake the audition, we watch three relationships comment on each other: Thomas and Vanda, from Ives’ Venus in Fur; Severin and Vanda, from Sacher-Masoch’s Venus in Furs; and Seigner and Polanski, from Polanski’s Venus in Fur.
Lines from Ives’ play, such as “I’ve been your slave since you entered this room,” which had double meanings in the source material, take on triple meanings onscreen, buoyed by Polanski’s own, well-documented history of sexual deviance. This may be one of the most confessional films he’s ever made, his kinks artfully concealed in the bondage of a play-within-a-play.
Polanski’s other contributions, as co-writer and director, are wry and subtly subversive. He gives Thomas’ fiancée the ringtone of Darth Vader’s theme music, suggesting their relationship might be imperfect well before Vanda digs her claws in. And, on the theater’s stage, there is some frequently funny business involving a hilariously phallic-shaped cactus prop from a recently produced version of Oklahoma!, which reappears in the frame in symbolically potent moments.
Indeed, there is much to love in this movie beyond the words, which are still mostly Ives’s. When the characters mime their props, as auditioning actors often do, Polanski adds sound effects that suggest the pouring of coffee and the tinkling of silverware. Alexandre Desplat’s musical score is one of his most playful in years, adding a perfectly ludic soundtrack to the story’s reversals and revelations.
The music ultimately takes on a circusy ambience, befitting a gonzo turn of events that echoes a ’70s Fellini bacchanal. I’m not sure it’s a satisfying climax, but it’s perhaps the only one Polanski could have provided that still honored his unfettered id. This is one film that can’t be tied down.
VENUS IN FUR. Director: Roman Polanski; Cast: Emmanuelle Seigner, Mathieu Amalric; Distributor: IFC/Sundance Selects; Rating: R; In French with English subtitles; Now playing at Tower Theatre in Miami and O Cinema in Miami Shores. Opens Friday at Movies of Lake Worth, Movies of Delray, and Living Room Theaters at FAU in Boca Raton