Butler's Cinema Scene

Emmanuelle Seigner, Mathieu Almaric in “Venus in Fur”

“VENUS IN FUR”  My rating: B+ (Opens July 18 at the Glenwood Arts)

96 minutes | No MPAA rating

It’s been a bad day for Thomas (Mathieu Almaric). While a raging thunderstorm soaks Paris, the playwright/director has wasted ten hours cooped up in a seedy theater  holding auditions. He’s seeking a cast for his new stage adaptation of Venus in Fur, Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s 1870 novella about a fellow who gets off on being whipped by a dominant woman. (Thus the word “masochism.”)

Thomas is alone, complaining to a colleague via cell phone about the talentless, self-absorbed actresses — “ten year olds on helium” — who have wasted his time with their wretched posing and preening. After hours of readings he’s no closer to finding someone to play Wanda, the dominatrix heroine of Sacher-Masoch’s tale.

He’s packing up to go home when the doors at the back of the auditorium blow open and a hyperactive blonde  in a raincoat enters, motor mouthing breathlessly about how she was delayed and can she still audition. The woman (Emmanuelle Seigner) introduces herself as Wanda — coincidence or omen? — and begs to be heard.

Thomas isn’t encouraged. This Wanda seems to be just one more prattling actress, a drowned cat with a mouthful of chewing gum.

She produces a resume that features a stint with the Urinal Theatre.

“I somehow missed their season,” Thomas observes dryly.

He’s even less impressed when she removes her raincoat to reveal an S&M outfit — the last-ditch ploy of a performer who can’t pull it off by skill alone.

Sensing his reluctance Wanda assures him that “I’m not usually in leather and a dog collar.  I’m really demure and shit.”

What she really is is a master manipulator who over the next 90 real-time minutes will take Thomas and the audience on a hell of a ride.

Roman Polanski, Mathieu Almaric

Directed by Roman Polanski, “Venus in Fur” is a compact adaptation of David Ives’ play (it was performed by Kansas City’s Unicorn Theatre late last year) that soars despite the limitations of just two characters and one claustrophobic setting.

Though he’s sure it will be a disaster, Thomas agrees to read with Wanda, and he is almost immediately struck by her ability to slip into the persona of a 19th-century woman. She understands the role of Wanda better than any actress he has seen all day.

Moreover, she has come prepared, pulling from her valise an old-fashioned smoking jacket — a fading label says it was tailored in 1868 — to help Thomas get into the role of the play’s masochistic hero.

Wanda is by turns demure, raunchy, ignorant and enlightened. What sort of game is she playing? Which is the real woman — the brainless floozie or the canny performer?

And in the end, does it matter? Like her literary namesake (we don’t even know if Wanda is really her name), she can wrap Thomas around her little finger, using her bruised sexuality to turn him into the living embodiment of the play’s humiliation-craving protagonist.

“Venus in Fur” works both as a metaphysical exploration and as a very funny wallow in manipulation and acquiescence.

And it’s absolutely oozing subtext.  The short, boyish Almaric offers an almost perfect parody of Polanski.

Meanwhile, there’s the delicious casting of Seigner — aka Mrs. Roman Polanski — as the the cajoling, controlling Wanda. It may be the best performance of her career.

Who knew that humiliation could be so much fun?

|Robert W. Butler