Like Robert Altman in the early Eighties, Roman Polanski, now in his early eighties, has turned his eye to filming intimate stage plays.

Like his previous film, Carnage, Venus in Fur is based on a successful play, this time a two hander set in a theatre.

Polanski lookalike, Mathieu Amalric plays writer/director Thomas who, at the beginning of the play, has endured a fruitless day of auditioning actresses for his adaptation of Leopold Von Sacher Masoch's novel, Venus in Fur.

He is complaining to his fiancé via mobile phone that all the twenty four year old actresses who attended the casting were neither sexy nor articulate and all sounded like six year olds on helium.

Enter Vanda, played by Polanski's wife, Emmanuelle Seigner, all profuse profanity at being late for her audition, blaming the foul weather and a frotteur for her tardiness.

Thomas tries to fob her off – she is profoundly older than the character specs and she has come dressed in leather gear and dog collar, citing the play, the bits that she's read anyway, “is basically S & M, right?”

Against Thomas' protestations, Vanda launches into the opening scene of the play and she is word perfect, astounding Thomas and creating an alchemy in the situation. The “play” takes over reality where the writer/director and the actress are consumed by the characters. Like an erotically charged Vanya On 42nd Street, the narrative morphs in and out, blurring the relationships of the players and smudging the parameters of reality and fantasy.

Thomas, who earlier in the piece said that he was going to direct the play within an inch of its life, discovers that giving an inch with Vanda is to give her a mile as she takes on the dominant role, demanding him to “go for it”

This role reversal in real life folds back into the play when she insists that he play the female role to her masculine.

Seigner is sensational as Vanda, voluptuous, sensuous, intelligent and emotionally layered. Amalric compliments her performance with a subtle increment of the subjugation she teases from him.

The play was written by David Ives and he shares screen-writing credit with Polanski. It's interesting to note that Ives adapted Polanski's film The Fearless Vampire Killers into a stage musical, so there appears to be a mutual admiration society at work here.

There are shades of the theatricality of that film in Venus In Fur, with it's dark and stormy night atmosphere, as well as a hint of Polanski's The Tenant.

The psycho-sexual and gender politics have been constant concerns in Polanski's pictures and Venus In Fur continues the tradition. Delicious.

// RICHARD COTTER

Previewed at Chauvel Cinemas, Sydney on 9 July 2014