La Vénus à la fourrure
Roman Polanski (2013)
I was sorry that the screen adaptation of David Ives’s play Venus in Fur didn’t give Nina Arianda the chance to put her famous Off Broadway then Broadway performance on lasting record. Instead, the role of Vanda is played by Emmanuelle Seigner, the wife of Roman Polanski, who worked with Ives on the screenplay. The other character in Ives’s two-hander is Thomas (Mathieu Amalric), who has adapted Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s 1870 novella Venus in Furs (sic) for the stage, intends to direct it and, at the start of the film, is reaching the end of an exasperating day of auditions for the part of Vanda. Thomas is on the phone to his girlfriend, lamenting the cluelessness of all the actresses he’s seen and saying he’ll be home soon. Then Vanda’s real-life namesake arrives in the theatre and begs Thomas to let her read for the role. He eventually agrees: Thomas reads the part of Severin, the rich idler who, in Sacher-Masoch’s story, becomes so obsessed with Vanda that he asks to be her slave and for increasingly degrading treatment at the hands of this ‘Venus in furs’. Thomas and Vanda act out various roles and antagonisms: the two characters in his play; writer and critic (or other audience member); director and actor; the individuals that Thomas and Vanda are; male vs female. None of this is surprising, even if (like me) you know nothing about the novella. Thomas, very early on, volunteers the information that his adaptation has a lot of himself in it; Vanda is soon complaining that the material is sexist S&M porn. Thomas never does get home. Venus in Fur ends with him tied up on the stage against a huge phallic cactus – a leftover from the set of the theatre’s previous production, some kind of spoof Western.
Polanski has made few films adapted from stage plays: Macbeth, Death and the Maiden, not much else until recently, but now two in a row – with Venus in Fur following Carnage. The latter was hamstrung on screen by the implausibility of the two couples staying together for the duration. That’s not a significant problem here. Once Polanski’s camera moves, as it almost immediately does, from a Paris street in a thunderstorm to inside the theatre, it stays there until moving out again, revealing a succession of exteriors in a kind of reverse Russian doll effect, in the closing shots. The fact that the physical setting for the story is a stage has the effect of validating the action rather in the way that an actual stage does in the theatre. You don’t wonder why Thomas doesn’t throw Vanda out. When, after one of their arguments, she threatens to leave, it’s clear that she won’t: the film will end if she does and there’s plenty of running time to go. But Venus in Fur isn’t a full-grown film. The structure of the piece is such that it doesn’t allow Polanski to do very much except direct the two actors. I was surprised the power struggle between Thomas and Vanda, as they inhabit their different roles, wasn’t more of a competition. Vanda nearly always has the upper hand: it’s one-way traffic as she reveals that she’s not the dumb actress she initially appears to be, that she knows the Sacher-Masoch original. She’s able to invent new scenes for Thomas’s adaptation, and new business, which usually discomforts him. (The only sense in which it might be said that a woman is being used by a man in this film is that Emmanuelle Seigner is required by her husband to expose a fair amount of bare flesh.) The games that Vanda and Thomas play are theatrical games designed by David Ives and Polanski. These games have no real weight and Alexandre Desplat’s meticulously roguish score reinforces this effect. The success of the film depends on the actors’ ability, and particularly the lead actress’s ability, to hypnotise.
The actors are considerably older than those who took the roles on the New York stage. Nina Arianda was twenty-five when she played Vanda in the Off Broadway production of 2010, opposite Wes Bentley, who was then thirty-one. Hugh Dancy, thirty-six at the time, replaced Bentley as Thomas when the play opened on Broadway in 2011. Mathieu Amalric will be fifty later this year, Emmanuelle Seigner forty-eight later this month. Seigner looks great but she doesn’t look young – in fact, she looks older than Amalric, who appears small and slight and has a boyish innocuousness about him. From the start, he somewhat resembles Polanski. I don’t want to make too much of the age difference between Arianda and Seigner but, since Vanda is meant to be a struggling actress desperate for a part, it has to be significant if she’s in her late forties rather than her mid-twenties. A bigger issue, though, is that Emmanuelle Seigner always looks utterly in charge. You don’t feel sorry for Vanda as she arrives, flustered and late, perhaps too late, for the audition: when she cries and wipes her nose with a tissue, Seigner is a strong, confident actress doing a bit of pretend snivelling – she doesn’t need to travel far at all to become the dominatrix to Thomas’s underling. Her playing of the role is powerful but monotonous. Mathieu Amalric, in the opening scene, acts the way actors often do at the start of a stage play – he’s too busy and emphatic, as if he has to establish himself with a live audience. Once he settles down, Amalric shifts more subtly than Seigner between Thomas’s different personae. In the closing stages, as the pair switch roles in the reading, he’s compelling. When Vanda applies lipstick to his mouth and puts the ‘fur’, a large shawl, round Thomas’s small form, Amalric looks to be turning into the cross-dressed Polanski in the climax to The Tenant.
6 June 2014
