Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10
Cast: Emmanuelle Seigner, Mathieu Amalric.
Foreign language films in Britain do tend to attract a niche audience but that should not deter any fan of cinema from attending a showing of Director Roman Polanski’s film Venus in Fur.
In the U.K. audiences do tend to be split in the appreciation of a good film that has travelled across the deep waters of the Channel, it is a shame but it does happen. If an exception should be made for a film in the last ten years then Venus in Fur should be top of the pile. For this highly charged, message filled, erotic and electrifying piece of cinema, the limits of enjoyment are only placed by the confines of the mind’s refusal to accept something new and something truly fascinating, even enthralling and most of all completely and wonderfully strange.
Venus in Fur is a two hander, accepted completely on stage but in cinema somehow becomes something to keep at arms-length, to bar entry to the conscious mind and yet the intensity that fills the screen is enough to last you till the next awards seasons. The relationship between actor and director, between muse and artist, and between women and men is taken to its zenith. At times the lines between the pair are of master and servant, of mistress and the domestic are so blurred that both Emmanuelle Seigner and Mathieu Amalric give penetrating performances in each distinct role.
When Vanda (Emmanuelle Seigner) walks in on the close of day of auditions for the role of Wanda von Dunayev in the adaptation of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s book Venus In Fur, what occurs is the type of Faustian pacts that would set Christopher Marlowe’s brain working on overtime and why he didn’t come up with the idea. The exotic meets the oddly disturbing; the danger of letting somebody into your lives when the door should have remained shut is there for the audience to really get their teeth into.
It is the blurring of the gender role, the exchange of sexual predatory position, the reveal that really wins the audience over and is enough to make anybody squirm at the fate to come.
In typical Roman Polanski style, the questions remain unanswered, except for what your brain or imagination allows you to see. For that alone it should be considered as the finest foreign film of the 21st Century so far.
Venus in Fur is a film to savour; you are unlikely to ever find a better two hander again in your life.
Ian D. Hall