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I just finished reading the script for the play the other day and wondered if anyone had seen it performed. God, is it great. And perfect for Polanski. Feels almost made for him. This could, in fact, be a return to real greatness after the folly of Carnage. But I attribute the failure of that to lousy source material, the opposite of the situation here. Polanski himself is, and always has been, utterly reliable. Still, he can only work with what he's got.

This piece provides him a rich range of possibilities. There are the obvious sexual politics and power games to which one might expect him to be attracted. But that description, which was all I knew going in, is woefully inadequate to encompass the depths of what is here. For one thing it's a far more surreal enterprise than I expected. And more inclined to play with blatant symbolism. That translates well in reading and I can imagine it working on stage in a stripped down form but I wonder what Polanski will make of it cinematically. The abstraction of it all, in other words, seems at times posed to overwhelm the specifics. Certainly that is intended but, as I say, renders up some unique challenges for adaptation to a presumably more concrete environment. There is also the issue of the language itself (specifically the slang). That is an element that seems to make the play distinctly American. Here too I wonder how he has handled that in transferring the action to Paris, since language is never just language but also bespeaks a cultural attitude and certain preconceptions.

Though the sexual power play angle will likely be how this is generally received and marketed it really does do a disservice to the material. What's most impressive is how that is sustained throughout, just how frenetic and breakneck it reads (there is little languor in the piece and no act breaks). It's concentrated and intense and relentless. It's also funny as hell. That takes some of the edge off but still here is another of those unique challenges. Obviously Carnage attempts something similar but, as far as I'm concerned, it's weak and shallow material. It just comes across as a grating screed whereas this is rich and smart. But that has to manage against the oppressive relentlessness of the presentation.

The control issues are paramount but what's especially interesting is the really rather profound sense of how implicit that is to art itself, to the creation and maintenance of it. Here the emphasis is on the unavoidability of control and power, its inevitability as a basic component of world comprehension or active re-imagining of the world. That's brilliant and brilliantly done, laced throughout but rarely ever overt. What is overt is the extreme fluidity of the roleplaying (which is channeled through the intensity of presentation). The premise, for those who don't know, is that the director and the actress are reading lines from his play based on Leopold von Sacher-Masoch's classic sadomasochistic tale, Venus in Furs. But what's astonishing is how they flow in and out of those lines of text and into lines from their own originally established characters. In the script for the play this is indicated via italics but I can only assume that's for the actors as I would imagine that the point is the fluidity, the inextricability of it all. Later they go so far as to shift gender assigned roles as things get really intense and confounding. We've seen stuff like this before, of course (I think of Beth B's great Two Small Bodies, others may think of Kiarostami's Certified Copy) but rarely has the device been as unyielding and punishing as this. It's a mental workout just to read. I can't imagine how it plays, especially if there are little to no clear signals to the audience as to the shifts.

Amalric seems like he will make a perfect screen surrogate for Polanski in what can't help but be conceived as a personal project between he and his wife, with all the resultant implications. One such implication is that it brings to mind Bitter Moon specifically and would seem ultimately to form some kind of perverse but ideal diptych with it, reversing in some ways or at least responding to the alarmingly conservative conclusions of the previous picture. And as much as this film would seem to be a continuation of Polanski's signature apartment set series of films this one will likely prove more challenging to produce than most as it's really just a glorified studio space and the sense you get is that there is little shifting away from the almost spotlit and concentrated center of the action. Still, I have no doubt that he can rise to those particular challenges.

John Cope wrote:This could, in fact, be a return to real greatness after the folly of Carnage. But I attribute the failure of that to lousy source material, the opposite of the situation here.

Maybe this ties more into the Carnage thread or a hypothetical theatre thread we should have, but here goes: I've been trying to understand what exactly went wrong with Carnage, which I've always attributed to a failure of tone, casting, and staging. I missed Venus in Fur during its Broadway run, unfortunately, but I did see God of Carnage (and later read it as well), finding it to be wittily written and staged to perfection when it played with its original cast. I've wondered if something was lost in the different English translations, B'way having used a Christopher Hampton script while Polanski's adaptation was from a another source and had distinctly different rhythms that hurt flow and resulted in a seemingly clunkier script than what I'd seen. What I enjoyed on the stage so much was a farce with some darkly comedic overtones. The film seemed to strive for humor at times, but all those moments that sent me into hysterics on stage felt more serious and overdone under Polanski's direction (perhaps the immediacy of theatre benefits a script like this one).

I've also wanted to discuss for a long time now an issue that I've seen on stage more and more lately: actors who have less theatrical background or have been slumming it in film for a long time seem to be playing for the camera rather than the audience when they attempt the stage. I know this is not a new phenomenon, but I've become increasingly aware of some very broad stage performances of late not being able to hit the rhythms of a theatrical script. In January, for instance, I saw Jessica Chastain in The Heiress during the same week I saw Mama and Zero Dark Thirty. While I found her more than credible in the films (as I have in most every film she's made to date), her acting came off as amateurish and over-the-top in a way that seemed wholly inappropriate for the production. It could be attributed to the a difference of interpretation of the material or the directions, but it was jarring, with the show receiving nonstop laughs for what I took to be a script more tragic than anything else. It reminded me of a clip I showed in my Intro to Literature class last semester to discuss theatre and interpretation of text, showing the difference between James Earl Jones and Denzel Washington performing the same scene in Fences. The performers in Carnage seemed to be at odds with material in much the same way, for it's more an awkwardly filmed play than a movie and the performers feel uncomfortable in the that style (less so John C. Reilly, who has more stage work under his belt). I'm disappointed that I missed Venus is Fur on the stage to see if see how it compares, though I'll ask friends when it does come out. I'm hopeful for this, especially with Almaric starring, though my earlier concern about transitional issues is a concern here as well, this time Polanksi working with an English play into French.
Thanks for tolerating my tangent.

Perhaps it is because I am unfamiliar with the stage play (god is California awful), but I actually thought that the film was quite good if in a slumming way. As film to just spin the wheels on I thought it was excellent in much the same way The Ghost Writer was.

John Cope wrote: There is also the issue of the language itself (specifically the slang). That is an element that seems to make the play distinctly American. Here too I wonder how he has handled that in transferring the action to Paris, since language is never just language but also bespeaks a cultural attitude and certain preconceptions.

Well, the translation to film felt seamless. Since the play speaks more about modern gender politics than specific American traits it didn't feel like much needed to be changed at all. I think the very beginning of the play was merged with the ending but other than that it was a pretty straightforward translation. And really, Paris is irrelevant to this since the film retains the single setting that the play uses. It's not about a specific geographical setting or about particular linguistic details but about a heightened, more universal "timeless" space.

John Cope wrote: Later they go so far as to shift gender assigned roles as things get really intense and confounding. We've seen stuff like this before, of course (I think of Beth B's great Two Small Bodies, others may think of Kiarostami's Certified Copy)

Or Polanski's The Tenant for that matter. Or parts of his Cul de Sac. The dizzying back and forth is only enhanced by the references to his previous films, Almaric's uncanny resemblance to him and of course the resonances to his personal life.

I don't know how many comedies or femme fatale roles Seigner has played but I hope she does more in this zany femme fatale vein. She more than holds her own as a real life "Venus." I've only seen a small fraction of her work, but if she's done anything better than this I would certainly love to see it.

Polanski has made many well-crafted films post-1969. But for me nothing that truly stands out as much as what came before that year. Hopefully he'll find other intimate raw small-scale works like this one that seem to bring out his best.

This is giving The Ghost Writer a run for its money as Polanski's best film in ages, and albeit in a very different modality he keeps a healthy rhythm that compels addictive attention. The layered emasculation of intellect, reason, and artistic skill tied into sex politics is perfectly executed by this sprouting perhaps-literal goddess. I love Mathieu Amalric as the Polanski stand-in trying to regain balance as he's wood by his wife, a never-better Emmanuelle Seigner. She is such a destabilizing presence that she both resembles the real version of the love he's searching for and yet also reflects how such a love is deeply unsettling, especially when taking in the blindsiding power differentials that thwart control over this fantasy. This is a film for everyone who has a part of their psyche that wants to have cake and eat it too without knowing what that entails, to actualize romantic fantasy bargaining against one's ego. This is one of the funniest, smartest, most vivacious movies I've seen in a long time, and Polanski's command of physical space in an actual stage, in addition to the clearly-personalized additions to this revived work, only proves how much more he's investing of himself in this adaptation vs something like Carnage. The spectrum of comfort and discomfort as we move between roles itself moves from humorous to poignant, and back again, revealing the security and disorder born from interpersonal development. Rarely does a film depict the absurdity of psychosocial collisions with both the comedy, and the respect, that they deserve. There's also something very cheeky about an artist peeling back the onion layers to accept his own complicit role in his art, working through shame to achieve a sick kind of enlightenment, and knowing this is not a sustainable finite state. The film is a culmination of Polanski's work in many ways, from Bitter Moon to an ending that can draw parallels to The Ninth Gate's own ending in powerless human reduction, of all things.