Geez, Roman Polanski, if you want to be tied up and called “slave,” you could have just kept that between you and the Missus.
Instead, Polanski made “Venus in Fur,” which stars Mathieu Amalric, the actor who looks like Polanski Jr., as Thomas, a temperamentally creative, sex-centered writer-director. Real-life Mrs. P, Emmanuelle Seigner, plays Vanda, the dimwitted guttersnipe (think a sexy Eliza Dolittle) who flounces into Thomas’ theater just as he is leaving and demands an audition as the
beauty/temptress/torturer at the heart of his play. It’s an adaptation of the 1870 novel “Venus in Furs” by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, from whose name we derive the word masochism.
Impatient and dismissive, Thomas nevertheless gets talked into doing a quick read with his would-be star. Her brisk, artful adjustment of the complicated stage lights is the first hint that she is not quite who she appears to be. A moment later she transforms into a lady of elegance and mystery, and the audition and the play start to blend together.
The movie, an adaptation of David Ives’ play, is a lean, shifty little creature, a showcase for an actress that allows her to display (in the cliché beloved by the Thespian set) “layers.” As a story, it’s clever, if a bit slow-footed and airless (we’re in the theater for virtually the entire running time). It conceals its twists artfully.
Yet it isn’t quite as clever as it thinks. This is one of those man-written feminist parables that looks an awful lot like a Penthouse art director’s idea of a feminist parable. There’s lots of slinking around in lingerie, or less. All the sultry vamping and bitchy trickery is, crucially, about the man’s development, character, weaknesses, fantasies. Vanda’s may be the juicier role by far but she’s ultimately just the facilitator, the tour guide to Thomas’ soul — a mistress who’s really a servant.