French actress Emmanuelle Seigner kisses her husband, director Roman Polanski, during a photocall for Venus in Fur.
DPA/Cannes
The race for the Cannes Film Festival’s Palme d’Or ended yesterday on a high note with a cracking black comedy from Franco-Polish director Roman Polanski and a wistful vampire film from cult US filmmaker Jim Jarmusch.
Venus in Fur is Polanski’s first film to be set in France.
It is one of 20 competing for the Palme d’Or, which the 79-year-old director won in 2002 for The Pianist. The film also won him the Best Director Oscar.
Venus in Fur is a satire about sexual fantasies and gender relations, which is based on a play about a 19th-century novella by Austria’s Leopold von Sacher-Masoch. The term sadomasochism is derived from his name.
The novella is about an aristocrat who becomes so infatuated with a woman, he asks to become her slave.
A reluctant dominatrix at first, Vanda comes to relish the role, until she meets another man, to whom she herself would like to submit.
Polanski’s French wife Emmanuelle Seigner plays a bawdy, seemingly failed actress, Vanda, who is desperate to play her namesake in the stage adaptation of the book.
Mathieu Amalric plays the conceited writer-director, who grudgingly allows her audition.
On stage, the dynamic quickly shift as Vanda takes the reins in a sort of play-within-a-play, to which the director, like the aristocrat in the story, willingly submits.
The end of her audition finds him smeared in lipstick and tethered to a column, as Vanda reveals herself a wronged Venus bent on taking revenge against men.
“It’s the aspect of the sexism and the satire on sex, which was very seductive in this film. There is this macho element in his (Amalric’s) character, which is really torn to pieces. That was quite enjoyable,” Polanski told a press conference.
When asked how his views on gender relations had changed over the years he launched into an unprovoked anti-feminist tirade.
“Trying to erase gender differences was ‘purely idiotic’,” he said. “I think it’s the result of – and like everything I will be Marxist here - of progress in medicine. I think that the pill has changed greatly the woman of our times, masculinising her ... and there are other elements. It chases away the romance from our lives and that’s a great pity.”
Yesterday also saw the premiere of Jim Jarmusch’s latest film, Only Lovers Left Alive.
Tom Hiddleston and Tilda Swinton play Adam and Eve, a vampire couple that have been privy to great moments in artistic and scientific achievement down the centuries.
But in the 21st century they find themselves facing extinction as a result of soulless “zombie” (human) activity.
Set in the Moroccan city of Tangier and a decaying Detroit, the film is a parable for the collapse of civilisation.
“For some people this is a vampire film, for some people it’s a fairy story and for other people, it’s a documentary,” Swinton said.
The winner will be announced by a jury headed by director Steven Spielberg at a gala awards ceremony today.