It’s a French movie based on a Tony award-winning Broadway play, that itself was initially based on a novel by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch. Venus in Fur is Roman Polanski’s adaptation of the story, brilliantly performed by Emmanuelle Seigner and Mathieu Amalric.
The film is best described as somewhere between a movie and a stage play. There are only two characters in one location for the entirety of the 96 minute feature. The main technical difference being that the film has a variety of shot selections and framing size options available, rather than the static, unchanged wide shot you get from theatre, but all the elements of a play build the structure and even pacing of the story.
Amalric’s Thomas Novacheck is fed up from a day of lousy auditions and is losing faith in his show; that is until Seigner enters stage left dishevelled and frazzled, desperate for a shot to try for the part. Begrudgingly, Thomas allows it and what he experiences next changes not only his view of his play, but his outlook on life in general.
It was an interesting experience to behold but thankfully the niche style Polanksi was trying to achieve was pulled off seemingly with ease, carried by the punchy, well thought-out dialogue and delivered with great verisimilitude on screen by the two lead actors who are reading over the script for the play of the same name in the movie. Their back and forth conversation switching from a script read through to actual dialogue was done with charm and wit as the characters begin to learn about each other during the audition, which incidentally is about sado-machoism; and if you don’t know what that means, be careful Googling it. So, as the plot unravels, we start to see a psycho-social case study of both the protagonists.
The camera-work, editing and sound design was on point, and unsurprising as for a one location shoot there’s an expectation to nail the areas you can control, but as an experience these elements added to the story, the stage lighting tonally setting up scenes and the use of sound effects when they interact with props that aren’t there but the sound is – definite highlight! It’s a way of using the medium to tell a story a different way.
Venus in Fur told the story it wanted to tell the best way it possibly could, granted its not the most exciting, groundbreaking or thought provoking film of the last 20 years although it made the official selection of the Cannes Film Festival 2013. It definitely ticks more boxes than it crosses but is quite a quirky, idiosyncratic story that reeks of typical foreign film tropes and plot devices. The films underlying selling point is that it is a great character piece and exploration.
Venus in Fur is showing exclusively at Palace Cinema from Thursday 17 July.
