REVIEW - VENUS IN FUR

We are told that Polanski's Venus is wrapped in fur. But she is merely clad skimpily in nylon and wool. His true Venus, the film, is wrapped in sexuality and theatricality, in literature and psychology, in all things intellectual and carnal, and in its two actors and one location. What an opportunity that might seem to a filmmaker working from an original concept, yet what a drag it doesn't just seem but actually is to a filmmaker working from a play. Accepting his space as more of a necessity than a challenge, Polanski deprives it of its wealthy character, using it as a blank stage (appropriately, perhaps) for the cerebral and the emotional, rather than the physical. David Ives' source provides Polanski with several films' worth of such material, which somewhat turns an exhaustive screenplay into an exhausting work, but the triviality of much of the dialogue and the playfulness of Polanski's tone allow Venus in Fur to withstand occasional lapses in concentration. Yet as Mathieu Amalric slowly, sensuously guides the zip up the endlessly long shaft of Emmanuelle Seigner's boot, mere millimetres from her skin, we're reminded of the sensational talent this man possesses, and dismayed at the relative frivolity of his recent work. And if it is this frivolity which makes Venus in Fur bearable, it also perverts the academic value of Ives' writing, and of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch's... granted, I'm not one to criticise any work of art for treating itself and other artistic works with flippancy, but if Polanski wants us to truly invest in this theorising, at least those of us who wouldn't naturally be drawn to do so, he ought not to treat it so casually. And so, his Venus is not at all wrapped in anything so highbrow as literature or psychology. In the end, she exits, wrapped in little more than her own bare skin, the pelt of other animals only grazing her own.