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"Venus in Fur" a Feminist Take on Porn
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Sunday, 31 January 2010 23:17
- Written by Lucy Komisar
Venus in Fur
Directed by Walter Bobbie
Written by David Ives
Starring Nina Arianda, Wes Bentley
In David Ives' ingeniously clever play, a feminist avenger turns the tables on a playwright conducting auditions for a work based on Venus in Furs, a novel of sexual domination and submission by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, the 19th-century Austrian writer.
Sacher-Masoch had fantasies about dominant women wearing fur. He signed a contract with one mistress making him her slave for six months; she would have to wear furs whenever possible. He divorced his wife, who did not like the games, and she wrote a tell-all memoir under the pseudonym of Wanda von Sacher-Masoch.
In Ives’ inspired invention at the Classic Stage, which might for the first time be putting on a work referencing classic porn, a fellow who seems to think of himself as a Sacher-Masoch meets a woman who goes "Wanda" one better. And the audience is a clear winner.
An actress curiously named Vanda Jordan (Nina Arianda) arrives in a rush at the studio rented by young playwright Thomas Novachek (Wes Bentley). She’s wearing a black leather skirt and a tight, black lacy underwear top; stiletto-heeled boots; and a silver-studded dog-collar. Her conversation is ditzy. She’s late, the auditions are over, and she’s not on the list. But she persuades Thomas to let her read, and suddenly she is Vanda von Dunayev, charming, articulate, and outrageous in the white flouncy dress she pulls over her grunge-wear.
In this steamy play-within-a-play, it is 1870, and we are learning about the pleasures of degradation. Thomas line-reads Severin von Kushemski. When he is 12, Kushemski's aunt beats him with a switch. It teaches him "that there can be nothing more sensuous than pain or more pleasurable than degradation. The Countess had become my ideal…" Since then, he seeks "a woman of her delicious cruelty."
Vanda, playing the woman to whom he’s transferred his kinky desires, warns him, "I’d be careful if I were you. When you obtain your ideal, she maybe crueler than you care for."
As the play in a play goes on, the truth about Wanda collides with the truth about Vanda. And the truth about Thomas is exposed. In fact, it’s Thomas’s fantasy that is at the heart of the reality of this play that plumbs men’s psychological connections between sex and power and their view of women. And it’s Vanda’s assertiveness that issues the feminist challenge to their notions.
Her character, Dunayev, declares, "In our society, a woman’s only power is through men. Her character is her lack of character. She’s a blank, to be filled in by creatures who at heart despise her. I want to see what Woman will be when she ceases to be men’s slave. When she has the same rights as he, when she’s his equal in education and his partner in work. When she becomes herself. An individual." Vanda comments that she is "really ahead of her time, isn't she."
"Women’s rights, yadda yadda," remarks Thomas. His fiancée, with whom he chats on the phone, seems assertive enough, presently studying for a doctorate. Is there an undercurrent of male resentment here? There turns out to be a back story to the play and the audition. Thomas starts getting suspicious that Vanda seems to know the script by heart, though she says she just thumbed through it on the subway. And she appends a running commentary about the text, switching between herself and the character as the play goes on.
Kushemski declaims that he wants to be dominated by Dunayev, "to be less than nothing, to have no will of my own. To be your property and vanish in your sublime essence." And he explains, "In love as in politics, one partner must rule. One of them must be the hammer, the other the anvil. I willingly accept being the anvil."
Vanda declares, "This ain’t about love. It’s about getting a piece of me."
Then suddenly there’s a switch. Dunayev says, "I could imagine giving myself to one man for life, if he commanded my respect. If he overpowered me with his strength. Overwhelmed me with the force of his being. If he enslaved me. I’m going to tell you a secret, Severin. I would submit to a man like that – and I would be faithful, too. I’d kneel to him and bend my neck to him and be his slave."
"He’s an oddity. She’s a commodity," Vanda comments."Like all women in eighteen-seventy-whatever."
Kushemski shows his true feelings about "the cruelty of women." When Dunayev admits, "Severin, don’t you see? Don’t you understand you’ll never be safe in the hands of a woman? Of any woman?" Vanda declares, “Now this part is so sexist it makes me like scream. She says, 'You’ve corrupted me…..This is like some old Victorian Teutonic tract against Das Female. He forces her into a power play and then he blames her.'"
Thomas is furious, "How can you be so good at playing her, and be so fucking stupid about her? You fucking idiot! You fucking idiot woman. Yes. Idiot woman. Idiot actress."
Nina Arianda is terrific as she shifts on cue between Wanda and Vanda. She is perfect as the slightly scatterbrained young woman who can’t manage to keep her belongings from slipping out of her hands, uses street language and becomes increasingly indignant about the "sexist" aspects of the play. Her voice and carriage are equally perfect as the self-assured aristocrat. Wes Bentley is a fine foil as Thomas Novachek, though Arianda is clearly the center of attention. Director Walter Bobbie styles and guides the past-paced fantasy so skillfully that you forget you are in a bare "studio" with little more than a table and chair.
The conflict escalates on page and on stage. The power and domination paradigms shift several times. I can’t tell more or that would spoil it. Suffice it to say that Ives writes a startling and satisfying feminist end to a famous bit of male pornography.
Venus in Fur
Classic Stage
136 East 13th Street
New York, NY
(212) 352-3101, (866) 811-4111
Opened January 26, 2010; closes February 21, 2010.
For more by Lucy Komisar: TheKomisarScoop.com
Photo credit: Joan Marcus
Kevin's Digital Week 11: MJ and Dali
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Saturday, 30 January 2010 05:00
- Written by Kevin Filipski
This Is It
(Sony)
Though it wasn’t planned as a Michael Jackson memorial, the rehearsal footage from his comeback concerts slated for London that had already been shot in Los Angeles became the focus of this celebratory film after the singer died this past summer.
Directed by choreographer Kenny Ortega, This Is It displays Jackson’s enormous talent while in his element onstage: the moves, the music and the charismatic presence are present in spades. The movie also gives us backstage glimpses, which are especially interesting when Jackson and his cohorts are shown creating new choreographed movements for the stage show. For MJ’s rabid fans, a big draw of this release is definitely the 90 minutes’ worth of extra material, including a lot more behind-the-scenes footage and interviews, along with Blu-Ray exclusives: vignettes for “Billie Jean” and “Smooth Criminal,” and a making-of the “Smooth Criminal” vignette.
DVD of the Week
Little Ashes
(E1)
Director Paul Morrison’s biopic about a trio of Spanish geniuses—surrealist painter Salvador Dali, leftist poet Federico Garcia Lorca and anarchic filmmaker Luis Bunuel—falls square between English-language clarity and Spanish-language authenticity. Although certainly not as good as Carlos Saura’s wonderfully surrealist exploration of these men, 2001’s Bunuel and King Solomon’s Table, Morrison’s film nicely captures the revolutionary era when art was thought to make a difference, even against Franco’s fascism.
There’s superior acting from all involved, even from Robert Pattison of Twilight fame, who convinces as the mercurial Dali. It’s too bad that there’s not more contextual info in the meager extras—short interviews with Morrison and several actors (sans Pattison)—which would definitely help those Twilight fans who might accidentally find these artists fascinating while watching the movie for their favorite vampire.
Godliness Next to Deadliness in "Legion"
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Monday, 25 January 2010 13:30
- Written by Maitland McDonagh / Miss FlickChick
Directed by: Scott Stewart
Written by: Peter Schink, Scott Stewart
Starring: Paul Bettany, Dennis Quaid, Tyrese Gibson, Charles S. Dutton, Jon Tenney, Kate Walsh, Lucas Black, Adrianne Palicki
Beleaguered parents of the world, take heart: If Legion is to be believed, even God Almighty has His hands full with kids. And if He can't keep his squabbling children in line, then really, how are you supposed to do better? Yes, that's irreverent, but we're talking about a movie that arms the studly, tattooed Michael with more machine guns than the Chechnyan army and pits him against trash-talking demon grannies, exploding corpses and an ice-cream seller who mutates into a spider-limbed acid nightmare — all because some trampy, chain-smoking hash-slinger is carrying a bastard who's supposedly the last, best hope of the human race. Reverence is so not the issue.
December 23, Los Angeles. As the street scum brawl, booze, screw and shoot up, a buff, heavily-inked stranger picks himself up off the mean streets and makes tracks for the shuttered Happy Toy Company, which traffics in more lucrative merchandise than squeaky Santas, if the hidden room crammed with machine guns is anything by which to judge. After painfully stitching up his bleeding shoulders — the ones that can't help but conjure the shadow of giant wings — the stranger kills a pair of cops, steals a police car and hits the road, lights sparking in his wake.
Meanwhile, a ragtag collection of travelers converges on the dismal Paradise Falls, a failing eatery on the edge of the sere Mojave desert. Bitter, disillusioned Bob (Dennis Quaid) owns the place with his no-bull partner Percy (Charles S. Dutton), a military veteran with a hook for a hand and an abiding belief in the good Book. Bob's son Jeep (Lucas Black) helps him run the place and is hopelessly in love with hard-luck waitress Charlie (Adrianne Palicki), who's eight months pregnant and mad at the world.
Unhappy, middle-aged malcontents Sandra and Howard (Kat Walsh, Jon Tenney) are seething in a booth while their trampalicious daughter Audrey (Willa Holland) shakes her barely-clad ass by the jukebox. Kyle (Tyrese Gibson) blows in on a cloud of poor map-reading skills and urban attitude, and just as the telephone, radio and TV cut out, sweet old granny Gladys Foster (Jeanette Miller) shuffles in looking for a nice bit of steak. It's another boring day in the diner at the end of the world, until Gladys transforms into a fanged freak and scuttles up the wall, hissing that Charlie's baby is going to burn in hell.
With the arrival of the wingless stranger — none other than the self-mutilating Archangel Michael (Paul Bettany) — the stage is set for a showdown of, well, Biblical proportions: Michael backs humanity while the angelic hardliner Gabriel (Kevin Durand) enforces God's every fit of divine pique.
Were you to cross The Prophecy with Key Largo, add a generous dollop of Night of the Living Dead and smother it with a yummy layer of apocalyptic imagery, you'd have something very like Legion, which is pretty damned entertaining when it's not bogged down in gloomy, backstory-driven sequences in which various characters lay bare their damaged souls.
If you like your angels meek, mild and bathed in subtle heavenly radiance, this is not the movie for you. But if your taste runs to black-winged mercenaries, child-berserkers with long knives, spider-limbed ice-cream salesmen and pestilent clouds of lies, well, then, Legion just might be the fiendishly divine diversion for you.
For more by Maitland McDonagh
: MissFlickChick.com
Kevin's Digital Week 10 - From Springfield to Jersey
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Friday, 22 January 2010 20:00
- Written by Kevin Filipski
The Simpsons—The Complete 20th Season
(Fox)
So what if The Simpsons has continued its slide down from its giddy heights of a decade ago? Even now, at its best, the show is laugh-out-loud funnier than anything else on television: Treehouse of Horror is always a hoot, and the parade of celebrity cameos (like Denis Leary, Joe Montana, Emily Blunt, Anne Hathaway, Ellen Page and Jodie Foster) is always good for a few chuckles. Since the show began being broadcast in hi-def in the middle of the season last year, the first nine episodes will have that square, less eye-popping look of non-HD transfers.
Those nine episodes are on the first disc; the second disc is given over to the dozen hi-def episodes, when the celebrated opening got a noticeable makeover and the in-jokes about HD came fast and furiously each week. Unlike previous season releases, there are no commentaries or other fun extras; rather, there’s a brief sneak peek of the recent 20th anniversary special hosted by Morgan Spurlock. Creator Matt Groening also drew new Blu-ray menus, and the cool packaging features a layout of so many characters from the show that even the most die-hard fan might not name (or even recognize) them all.
DVD of the Week
Artie Lange
Jack and Coke
(Image)
Despite his recent personal problems, New Jersey-born Artie Lange has been one of the most visible comedians of the past decade, thanks to his long stint as sidekick on Howard Stern’s radio show. He’s also a valuable raw stand-up who’s unafraid to tackle even the most dicey material, which he proves as soon as walks onto the stage at the Gotham Comedy Club in Manhattan: he announces that he’s glad Heath Ledger is dead.
