Review of Venus in Fur (2013) by Kenneth L — 14 Mar 2015

It's actually been quite a long time since I've had this indifferent a reaction to a movie. There are other movies I've actively disliked more, to be sure; but this one I just sort of did not care about. I can't remember watching many other movies in as cold a mood as I did this one. Perhaps it simply has to do with my being unable to relate to the characters or subject matter; but for whatever reason, despite the fact that it was made by Roman Polanski (who has a pretty good track record as a filmmaker and a pretty horrible one as a person), my response to this movie could be summed up as: "meh.".

The movie, which is rather obviously an adaptation of a play, focuses on a writer-director (Mathieu Amalric, from The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, among other films) who is coaxed into allowing an actress (Emmanuelle Seigner, Polanski's wife, and also from The Diving Bell and the Butterfly) audition for the lead role in a play about masochistic relationships. As they read through lines together, the boundary between role and actor blurs, as the play seems to provide a means for one or both of them to investigate their own actual kinks and psychological quirks.

It might be that I didn't relate to this movie simply because sadomasochism itself makes no sense to me and never has. Maybe someone who actually understood all that business would get more out of the movie than I did; but I suspect maybe even such a person still would not. I found it utterly impossible to identify with or invest in either character, and thus did not care what happened. Now, not every movie necessarily needs a protagonist you can invest in - the career of Stanley Kubrick gives us one amazing film after another without strong or likable protagonists. But if you're not identifying with a character, then usually you identify with the perspective of the movie itself - again, something Kubrick excelled at. Here, however, I'm not sure there really is an outside perspective available for the audience - we're trapped with these two characters, and the movie stays so close to them that no outside perspective is really possible. Without a point of view on the subject matter, and with subject matter I kind of didn't care about in the first place, I found myself utterly uninterested in what happened next in the film. I only watched it through to the end, really, because I wanted to see if Polanski would pull a good ending out of it, and because I never give up on movies as a general rule. Honestly, though, this is the first time in a while I kinda wish I had simply used the time I spent on this movie to watch something else.