There are a lot of layers in Roman Polanski's film 'Venus in Fur': a film about a play, based on a book, that is set in a theatre (the plot features the audition for the fictional play) and which itself adapted from an actual play. Then there's its subject matter, masochism, which itself contains an element of role play, and the fact that in auditioning for the play, the characters are themselves playing (or maybe not just playing) at masochism. As the viewer, you can never be certain of what is real, or even what "real" means in such a context. For all its cleverness, I found it over-acted and too obviously contrived to be completely convincing. But hey, whatever turns you on...
Review of Venus in Fur
