"We’re all easily explicable, yet remain inextricable" – Thomas, Venus in Fur.

The inextricability of fiction from reality is a threefold problem in Roman Polanski’s latest film. It first besets Severin, the protagonist of the 1870 Austrian novel Venus in Furs of which the film’s protagonist Thomas (Mathieu Amalric) is directing a theatrical adaptation; and who slowly falls prey to the masochistic (the term derived from the name of the book’s author, Leopold von Sacher-Masoch) fantasy he concocts with his mistress Vanda. Second, it afflicts Thomas, his relationship with the lead begins increasingly to resemble that of their fictitious counterparts. Yet thirdly, and perhaps most remarkably, it touches Polanski himself, having cast his own wife, Emmanuelle Seigner as Vanda. Weird, huh.

The simplicity of the film, shot as a single scene, is deceptive. Small touches warp the film’s apparent realism: Nicolas Becker’s well-executed foley as Thomas and Vanda’s mimes (sipping from a teacup, unfolding paper) become aurally realised; Seigner’s Mary Poppins-esque holdall, which contains everything from a nineteenth-century smoking jacket to a leather dog collar; the film’s bookending by an animation of the theatre’s doors opening, a detail redolent of The Moulin Rouge. Overlay this with Alexandre Desplat’s jaunty, carnivalesque score and the film begins to approach the bizarre. It is this formal surrealism that gives the bite to what would otherwise tip over into twee metatheatre, the limp predictability of the play-within-a-play.

Yet it is predominantly the acting itself that lifts this potentially flat format. However incestuous (though strangely appropriate) the casting of his wife may be, Seigner’s Vanda is pure genius. She combines wily sensuality with disarming innocence, collapsing Thomas’s notion that auditioning actresses are either "dykes" or "whores" by niftily eluding typecasting. Amalric, though strong, is markedly more wooden, struggling with the multiple roles that Seigner seems to juggle with ease. While Seigner seems always to hold something back of her Vanda (or Vandas), Amalric fails to point to any hidden depths in either Thomas or Severin. Far from being a two-hander, the film is a storm with Vanda, in both her nineteenth- and twenty-first century incarnations, at its eye.

Sadly, much of the film’s subtlety is lost in translation: shifts between filmic and theatrical roles that might otherwise be inferred from intonation are spelt out too explicitly in subtitles, which also throw up the occasional translational gaffe ("That’s good actin’ for ya!" being perhaps the most painful), and handle foreign accents awkwardly. The sexual tension the film builds up, however, remains intact, sustained with unflinching intensity as Thomas/Severin zips up Vanda’s knee-high boots. In fact, one gets the impression that the sexual ease that holds Venus in Fur together might not easily be transposed onto a British set. 

The film is an intriguing exercise in involvement. It reflects the enigmatic truth that, as Severin says, "Life makes us what we are in an unforeseen instant", that our identity is not preordained, but formed moment-by-moment as we act out our lives. The reference to Euripides’s Bacchae, which might seem awkwardly crowbarred in, is illustrative of this point. Yet as ever, Polanski is careful to handle this classical allusion with an absurdity that offsets its erudition, Seigner performing her Dionysiac dance to an Amalric strapped to a penis-shaped cactus cut-out. Perhaps not so easily explicable after all.