Venus In Fur contains the best argument you never expected for needing a female point of view.
Emmanuelle Seigner strikes a pose while Mathieu Amalric searches for motivation in Venus in Fur.
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The trouble with the term "strong female characters" is that a lot of people take the "strong" part literally and never get to the real issue. It's not that film and television need more women wielding guns and swords or strapped into battle corsets and towering boots (not that there's anything wrong with that), but being a badass isn't a safeguard from being one-dimensional, inessential to the story, or primarily on-screen decor. The plea for strong female characters is really one for a point of view, for women on screen who aren't just prizes or accessories or things to be rescued, who've actually been considered as people outside of how they affect a male protagonist.
The best new contribution to this debate comes from an unexpected corner — that of Roman Polanski, whose latest film, Venus In Fur, opens in limited release this Friday and will hit VOD the same day. Polanski adapted the screenplay with David Ives, who penned the original play, which (bear with me) centers on a play based on a 19th century novel called Venus In Furs by Austrian writer Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, the guy who gave us the term "masochism." The book was inspired by the author's own life and follows Severin von Kushemski, who becomes the slave of Wanda von Dunayev, the woman he's obsessed with, encouraging her to become the proto-dominatrix of his dreams.
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The movie is more... BDSM-adjacent. Its characters, a pair of Parisians trying to put on a theatrical version of von Sacher-Masoch's story, enact and discuss a sexy story of submission and dominance, but their power struggle is more creative than erotic, even as the clothes come off. Auditioning actress Vanda (Emmanuelle Seigner) and writer-director Thomas (Mathieu Amalric) are really contending over who better understands the material, and their battle is a delicious one involving flirtation, ego, and judicious costuming.
Venus In Fur is set entirely in a small theater at the end of a day of auditioning, where Thomas bitches over the phone about the flightiness of the actresses he's been seeing, noting he'd do a better job at playing the lead role. When Vanda comes in, blowzy and brash, dressed in a thematically (but not period) appropriate dog collar and corset, he immediately writes her off, but she bullies her way into being seen, with him reading the other part. There's a touch of magic to the way she's got the perfect vintage gown to put on, that she shares a name with the character, that she somehow got hold of Thomas' entire play and has it memorized.
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