Venus in Fur

Thomas, a Paris theatre director, has spent a long day auditioning actresses for the lead in his new production and found none of them suitable. He is about to leave when Vanda arrives: loud, impulsive and apparently the opposite of everything he wants. She embodies much of what he despises, yet she will not take no for an answer. Reluctantly he lets her read, and she transforms before him, arriving prepared with costumes and props, knowing the part thoroughly. As the audition stretches on, the balance of power between director and performer shifts, and his resistance turns into fascination. The play they are working on is drawn from Leopold von Sacher-Masoch's novel Venus in Fur, and the film takes its title from that book.

Roman Polanski directed and co-wrote the screenplay with David Ives, adapting Ives's own stage play, and the result is essentially a two-hander. Emmanuelle Seigner plays Vanda and Mathieu Amalric plays Thomas; for much of the running time they are the only people on screen, in a single Paris theatre. The film is the twentieth of the twenty-three features Polanski has directed, arriving between Carnage and Based on a True Story.

It runs 96 minutes and was released in 2013. On IMDb it holds 7.1 out of 10 from roughly 22,000 votes, and on TMDB 7.2 out of 10 from a much smaller pool of about 769 users, so the two audiences broadly agree. A critics' rating of 7.1 out of 10 from 116 reviews places it close to both audience figures.