This is a review of Venus in Fur (La Vénus à la fourrure¹) (2013)
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5 June
This is a review of Venus in Fur (La Vénus à la fourrure¹) (2013)
So, Venus in Fur (2013) almost reunites Emmanuelle Seignerand Mathieu Amalric(from The Diving Bell and the Butterfly) (2007), but not...
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) June 1, 2014
Once one has seen Mathieu Amalric look amazed – with boggle eyes – a few times, it ceases to be nearly as amazing. Just as his looking as perky to please as a spaniel, or a couple of other states evoked by the face, does not really effect a transition in what is a dramatically flat situation, of switching between a handful of modes. And, regrettably, Emmanuelle Seigner has to do much the same - a bit as if the full schema of Eric Berne’s Games People Play had been limited to toppling over between a few mood-states (not the whole gamut implied by the principles of transactional analysis) :
Though, for those who praise Locke (2013), the lack of anything going on is a virtue, and here, except for a fairly predictable game, nothing is (actually) of a game-changing nature. (If it were, Martin Clunes, say, would be out of a job in a film such as Staggered (1994) – for many a best man’s prank is many times more elaborate than what happens here.)
If a film adaptation seems to lack cinematic qualities, why do we need it, rather than watching (or reading) the stage-play, Venus in Fur ?
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) June 1, 2014
Yet what is of great relevance here is that what Polanski has directed feels little like a film, but a film of a play (as with August : Osage County, which (throughout) struggles a little more not just to be a series of interiors). We could even cut out David Ives altogether, as middleman (qua author of the play), and go to this seminal novel – if one did not suspect that its claims to importance are as overrated as those who say that Cleland’s Fanny Hill, or Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure is a towering work of world literature… (Although one scarcely insists that a middling text cannot be transformed to make a dazzling screenplay, of course.)
For an adaptation of a play, @LittleTheatreUK, not a patch on Polanski's own, of Ariel Dorfman's work, in Death and The Maiden (1994) ?
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) June 6, 2014
By contrast with what, from Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, is called variously a novel and a novella (of uncertain length), what about the enterprise Stanley Kubrick embarked on (with Frederic Raphael) in what proved to be his play film – broadly adapting Arthur Schnitzler (Traumnovelle) in Eyes Wide Shut (1999) ? Given what Polanski has given us, even what IMDb tells us about Venus in Furs (1969), in all truth, sounds as though it has more ‘going for it’ (currently rated 5.8, versus 7.2 for Polanski), if one forgets that the first and second sentences, together, seem confusing ! :
A musician finds the corpse of a beautiful woman on the beach. The woman returns from the dead to take revenge on the group of wealthy sadists responsible for her death.
Maybe Polanski thought that it a very good idea to adapt David Ives' stage-play in Venus in Fur (2013) : Maybe MeretOppenheim said more ?
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) May 31, 2014
This is Méret Oppenheim’s classic, provocative piece, Object (1936), (which is owned by MoMA, The Museum of Modern Art, New York)
The very opening of the film, with the boulevard, the trees, the train, wanted to be promising, but even the conceit that followed straight after, as we veer right, was much more akin to Mary Poppins (1964) than anything to which we would ever give our heart or soul** – or maybe we would give it willingly to what might present as a patent French confection, such as Amélie (2001), but has actual depths.
Ultimately, one judges for oneself (by going to a screening, maybe staying to the end, although more wildly tempted than either of the characters, perhaps, just to leave), but the triangle of forces of Polanski, Amalric and Seigner have been brought to bear on the Ives text in such a way that even saying Putain de merde ! seems not quaint, but outlandish. And it is not that Vanda's (Seigner's) oscillation between ditzy initial presentation and divinity is not done with some force, some panache, but that is half the problem :
For Polanski too ostentatiously relies on Alexandre Desplat’s rather nasty score to add something that just is not there in the script, with the result that any attempt at dramatic irony (which, in any case, is rarely best employed as a sustained gambit ?) more closely resembles a strong sense of predictability – and also merges with one's not caring what happens.
As mentioned², the plot requires Thomas (Amalric) to be alone when Vanda arrives, but there is no sense at all that anyone else has ever been there, let alone a string of unpromising auditioners – and these two, by the direction in which one moves at the other’s direction, do not even know their stage left (as seen from the stage, facing front) from their audience left (as seen from the auditorium, facing front). Are they film actors, pretending to be actors, pretending to be, respectively, writer-turned-director³ and actor… ?
Or something more archetypal, more primal, though that notion vanishes as soon as one tries to rely on it too much, let alone when we have had thrust in the face of our credulity all the outfits and other tat that are suddenly brought into this place… ?
As already suggested, people drifting in and out of roles, and the resultant power-play, seems so stale, especially if it is Carnage (2011) again, but light on the (would-be) levity ?
End-notes
¹ Note that definite article – in French, one cannot just say Vénus à la fourrure, any more than, in Italian, one can have Grande Bellezza on its own (The Great Beauty (2013)).
² That film ends in reverse of its beginning, and so does this one – a well-worn way of symbolizing that the spell cast by The Prologue at the start of Henry V, or by Prospero, has been broken by or at the end.
But, one has to ask, to what effect use this device, and was it not, in all likelihood, just to tweak the play’s opening by being in Vanda's view-point as she enters, rather than her coming in and surprising Thomas, already there ?
³ Though, as Thomas labours the point, he has adapted, not written, the text for the play, so that we can sense – as if we do not abundantly – his pliant nature, poorly masked by inflexibility as a strategy…
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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
