La Vénus à la Fourrure
From your perspective, I may have entered a blog posting frenzy, but the truth is that I am actually in a movie-watching frenzy. I dream of a life in which I can watch two or three movies a day… every day. One movie after breakfast, one movie after lunch and one movie after dinner, something like this. When writing blog posts, I almost always end up checking out other films, or my old lists, and that will naturally make me desire to watch more. I casually jotted down the titles I am most interested in right now, which immediately came to a list of 15 films. Fifteen!
“Venus in Furs” is one of those rare films that Loris has also seen, so here you can watch me struggle and fail to write something smart about it. (Though, honestly, I didn’t quite do a great job with “Carnage”.) Unlike “Carnage”, which is very much set in modern times and deals with modern themes, “Venus in Furs” takes a very old subject with a grain of salt. I kept rolling my eyes on how outdated the film’s topic was, but then I realized that it was actually making fun of its old-fashionedness. Luckily, the subtlety with which Polanski portrays the descent of Novachek into his power fantasies and the humour in which these fantasies are laid bare by a splendid Emmanuelle Seigner. I’ve always wanted to see Mathieu Amalric in drag, and this role was perfect for that.
There is something very sexy about the film, the eroticism of the characters’ relationship is very obvious, yet at the same time we see almost nothing actually beautiful or sexual. Not a single piece of fur is actually shown in the film, so even with the right light, hair and make-up, Vanda always looks like she is mocking what she does there, despite the gravitas in her voice. Unsurprisingly, she manages to change voice and tone in a split second, illustrating how silly their make-believe playing is and just how deeply Novachek has already sunken into the game.
After seeing the film, I spent a day reading Sacher-Masoch’s “Venus im Pelz” which is pretty much exactly what I expected. That book in which I didn’t understand every reference (who was Messalina again? Oh she was Britannicus’s mother!) actually surprised me with how well the characterization proceeded. It’s a straight-forward story in which the message “Be a master or a slave” is reiterated a million times, but what makes it lovely is the way the characters’ passion is described. With that said, I actually enjoyed the scenes in which Wanda and Severin make love in a “normal” fashion. The way they sunk into each other arms in passionate kisses sounded much nicer than the description of Severin’s suffering and Wanda’s commands. ‘Genuine’ passion is just more realistic in my book (and closer to what I experience, I suppose) and it’s much more timeless. I think that kind of sadistic passion is fairly outdated and becomes completely obsolete when the genders are equalized (just as the book claims, in fact), whereas simple love-making might occur in any society and at any times.
It seems like I prefer Polanski’s lessser-known films like his really old and really new films. “La Vénus à la fourrure” is definitely one of them.