Film Review: Painfully pleasurable

The German writer Leopold von Sacher-Masoch is more famous for giving his name to a sexual preference than he is for the books he wrote.

However, if you're a Velvet Underground fan you'll know that Lou Reed wrote the song Venus in Furs based on Sacher-Masoch's novella about a man with a proclivity for being dominated by women in fur.

Now director Roman Polanski has adapted American playwright David Ives's Venus in Fur, the tale of a theatre director working on a production of a play based on the novella.

Whatever you may think of the Polish director's history and his more than 30-year quest to avoid facing charges for sex with a 13- year-old in 1977, his ability as an adaptor of theatrical works to the screen is unsurpassed. This clever, claustrophobic two-hander is no exception.

Casting Mathieu Amalric, a dead-ringer for the director himself in his younger days, and his own real-life wife Emmanuelle Seigner, Polanski adds a spooky layer of self-referentiality that becomes harder and harder to ignore as the film progresses.

Amalric plays Thomas, a writer-director who we find at the end of a rainy day of disappointing casting in a theatre in Paris.

In walks Seigner's Vanda, a little too old for the part, but sharing the same name as the lead character in his play. He lets Vanda read for the part and what follows is a layered, complex and often quite funny examination of relations of dominance between the sexes and the power of acting that Polanski carefully controls using just a few tricks and expert cinematography to convey.

Ives's clever script, Polanski's understated direction and the subtle balance between the actors all work carefully together to make the film an intriguingly engaging piece of old-fashioned erotica.

What others say

The film is about acting and the voyeuristic delight, sensual and cerebral in equal measure, that comes from watching it happen.

A.O. Scott, New York Times

A playful if occasionally heavy-handed jeu d'ésprit on the subject of sexual role-play, the games we all play, illusion and reality, and directing as a sexual act.

Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian

Thanks to the actors' zesty performances and evident delight in the material, every microshift in their dynamic provides a fresh burst of pleasure.

Dana Stevens, Slate