A local film barely opened last weekend, playing one show a night in one Paphos cinema (it may well have closed by the time you read this). It’s called Ta Kalytera Mas Chronia (‘The Best Years of Our Lives’) and appears to be a high-school comedy with a mostly teenage cast. I haven’t seen the film, but I did check out the trailer which looks both enthusiastic and amateurish – a sign of the times, when anyone can pick up a camera and make a movie. That its actors are predominantly young seems entirely fitting.
From one end of the spectrum to another: this week’s films, for some reason, are both made by elderly masters, two of the most famous and established directors on the planet – and both films are old in another way as well, in being hermetically sealed. It’s not a question of energy: Martin Scorsese brings tremendous energy to The Wolf of Wall Street [see opposite page], and Roman Polanski puts Venus in Fur through its paces ably enough – but both are essentially bubble films, set in enclosed dramatic spaces, lacking that burning fascination with the outside world that’s a hallmark of youth.
Venus in Fur, based on a Tony-winning play by David Ives, is sealed within the confines of a theatre stage – not just aesthetically, in being theatrical, but literally, because the whole film takes place in a theatre where Thomas (Mathieu Amalric) is casting his next production, an adaptation of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s Venus in Furs. As the curtain rises he’s alone in the theatre, on the phone to his fiancée and bemoaning the difficulty of finding a suitable actress; all the ones he’s seen, he scoffs, sound like 10-year-old girls on helium. A thunderstorm rages outside; Thomas is getting ready to go home – but then there’s a knock at the door, he turns and sees Vanda (Emmanuelle Seigner) standing at the entrance, bedraggled and soaked to the skin.
What ensues is a two-hander and a game of domination – which is also, not coincidentally, the subject of Venus in Furs (Herr Sacher-Masoch was the original masochist); the film aligns the director/actor relationship with S&M, an idea that’ll seem brilliant to directors and actors, slightly presumptuous to everyone else. Vanda doesn’t look very promising, a gum-chewing bimbo who dismisses the book as “porno” (“It’s one of the great texts of world literature!” protests Thomas huffily) – but he lets her audition, then stands there looking mesmerised as the coarse girl instantly transforms into a 19th-century lady. Thomas (like the hero of his play) is hooked, and the tables get progressively turned.
Clearly, this dialogue-heavy French drama (actually more of a black comedy) isn’t for everyone; it’s showing for just a few days at the Friends of the Cinema Society. Equally clearly, Polanski seems to have made it as a jape, with a juicy starring role for Seigner (a.k.a. Mrs. Polanski) and some sly references to his own life. Vanda claims Venus is “a play about child abuse” (the protagonist recalls being beaten as a child), and Thomas is properly indignant: “This modern mania for reducing everything to a social problem!” he rants, calling for Art to be treated as Art – a sore point for Polanski, whose own art has too often been overshadowed by (yes) his conviction for child abuse. Then there’s the bit where Vanda needles Thomas over the fact that his fiancée is (among other things) much younger than himself. Seigner and Polanski have a 33-year age difference.
It may seem shallow to talk about such details – but in fact the main themes seem a bit muddy in Venus in Fur (I didn’t even find it very funny, especially compared to Carnage, Polanski’s previous play-into-film adaptation). The play being rehearsed is about male submission and female domination; Vanda claims that’s misogynist, and maybe it is – but then the film feminises its hero in the final act, clearly intending it as a humiliation, so isn’t that also misogynist? Is the script making any kind of statement, or just toying playfully with notions of patriarchy?
Probably the latter. After all, that final-act indignity is a joke, tying in with Thomas’ early assertion to the fiancée that he’d make a better Vanda than most of the bimbos he’s been seeing (“Just put me in a dress and a pair of stockings…”). Maybe the whole thing should be viewed as a joke, a civilised entertainment for theatre (and film) audiences without any pretensions to profundity – though I still found the acting too mannered, and the dialogue too contrived. Venus in Fur is impressive but dead, whereas Ta Kalytera Mas Chronia (based on its trailer) is unimpressive but a sign of something stirring. Venus is a film made by cultured, complacent Thomas; the future belongs to the Vandas.
DIRECTED BY Roman Polanski
STARRING Mathieu Amalric, Emmanuelle Seigner
In French, with Greek subtitles.
France 2013 96 mins
