Movie Reviews

Roman Polanski’s latest movie is a two-character play set almost entirely in a Parisian theater. A soaked through actress (Emmanuelle Seigner) bursts into a theatre, late for an audition. The director (Mathieu Amalric looking like a young Polanksi) first wants to send her away but then gets sucked/suckered into auditioning the leather-clad Vanda (Emmanuelle Seigner) for the lead female role. They then get drawn into an elaborate role-playing game that blurs the lines between fiction and reality. They talk their way through the play, work out dialogue problems, flirt and talk about the novel the play is based on “Venus In Fur” by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s, one of literature’s most famous perverts.

If the above sounds boring, that’s because… well, the movie is boring. Vanda bursting into the theatre is perhaps the most action-filled sequence in what is otherwise a dull and drab movie about power, perversion, relationships and the battle of the sexes with the director and Vanda constantly seguing in and out of play, switching roles and doing nothing but boring the fuck out of me for 96 minutes. At one point Vanda forgoes her lines and resorts to saying ‘blablabla’ instead, which pretty much sums up the movie perfectly.