News location:

Canberra Today 15°/16° | Friday, March 29, 2024 | Digital Edition | Crossword & Sudoku

Review / ‘Venus in Fur’ (MA) ****

venus-in-furIN Roman Polanski’s hands, David Ives’s Broadway play of the same name, based on Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s 1870 novel about the giving and receiving of pain as a sexual stimulus, is remarkably effective cinema.

People expecting an erotic buzz from it are backing a loser. Sacher-Masoch was concerned to bring masochism into the light and explain its sexual links. The intellectual processes underlying its plot are the dialogue-driven film’s predominant focus, with references to anatomical bits by words rather than explicit pictures.

A woman arrives late at an otherwise empty Paris theatre to audition for a play written by its director adapting Sacher-Masoch’s novel. They have never met. It’s his first play. At first sight, it seems that it’s her first try for an acting job.

She presents as an ill-informed ditz whom no director would engage in a fit. But after reading the first three pages of the script with her, he begins to realise that her behaviour to that point is indeed a virtuoso performance. Her desperate campaign to get the role piques his curiosity enough to continue.

As the pair proceeds with discovering each other, life begins to imitate art. The actress becomes Vanda, the woman in the novel. He falls into the thrall that her unabashed words and spectacular carnality impose.

Polanski’s wife Emmanuelle Seigner, magnificent as Vanda, and Mathieu Amalric as Thomas the playwright/director, bring impressive skills to a work redolent of live theatre and cinema. The material shines a useful light into the shadowy world where doms (dominants) and subs (submissives) play out the emotional and physical pain games that bring them sexual pleasure. And who among us may gainsay how consenting adults do that?

At Palace Electric

Who can be trusted?

In a world of spin and confusion, there’s never been a more important time to support independent journalism in Canberra.

If you trust our work online and want to enforce the power of independent voices, I invite you to make a small contribution.

Every dollar of support is invested back into our journalism to help keep citynews.com.au strong and free.

Become a supporter

Thank you,

Ian Meikle, editor

Dougal Macdonald

Dougal Macdonald

Share this

Leave a Reply

Related Posts

Music

Cunio takes top job at NZ School of Music

Immediate past head of the ANU School of Music, Kim Cunio, is to become head of school at Te Kōki, the NZ School of Music, part of the Victoria University of Wellington, reports HELEN MUSA.

Follow us on Instagram @canberracitynews