Roman Polanski’s latest film, Venus in Fur, opened in France this month, with a likely 2014 release coming from Sundance Selects.
Venus in Fur (La Venus a la Fourrure) -a second stage-to-screen adaptation – premiered at the Cannes Film Festival a few months ago.
Venus in Fur premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 2013
Taking over the roles made famous by Hugh Dancy and Nina Arianda (the latter winning a Tony for best actress), Roman Polanski brought on his wife, Emmanuelle Seigner, and her own Diving Bell and the Butterfly co-star, Mathieu Amalric.
Emmanuelle Seigner and Mathieu Amalric play a duo thrown into a game of cat and mouse centered on a young actress determined to book the lead role in a new play.
Venus in Fur’s first French trailer (without subtitles) and the first poster are now available.
[youtube ESVysIuezRg 650]
Emmanuelle Seigner, wife of controversial film director Roman Polanski, has claimed that she has been criticized by other Frenchwomen because of her “success, beauty and money”.
Roman Polanski is notorious as a fugitive from justice in the US over the r**e of a 13-year-old girl.
However, Emmanuelle Seigner, 46, has suggested that the main reason she has faced attacks from her fellow Frenchwomen was their jealousy of her “success, beauty and money”.
The actress and pop singer said she could not explain the chemistry between herself and the 79-year-old Oscar-winning director but admitted she liked the “danger” and unpredictability of not fitting the mould of a perfect relationship.
Emmanuelle Seigner, who is a close friend of Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, the former French first lady, has said: “In France, I guess there’s something like a tyranny in mentalities – we accept success badly, beauty, money.”
“People are certainly envious, and this creates negative energy. This is annoying. I suffered a great deal at one time. I had to fight harder than others. Add to that my marriage to Polanski.”
Emmanuelle Seigner was asked about what generated the romantic spark between her and Roman Polanski, whom she married in 1989.
Emmanuelle Seigner, wife of Roman Polanski, claims Frenchwomen are jealous of her success and beauty
“I don’t know. I ignore the ingredients. I guess that would be love. This can’t be explained,” she told Madame Figaro magazine.
“Perhaps because there’s an age difference – the improbable side that makes it probable. There are relationships where everything works and looks perfect, and that doesn’t interest me.
“I don’t like the idea of fitting into a mould, so as to conform. What I like is the danger, the difference – being unpredictable.”
Emmanuelle Seigner met Roman Polanski while appearing in one of his films, Frantic, in 1988, alongside Harrison Ford, but is now mainly known for her work inside France. The pair live in central Paris with their two children, Morgane and Elvis.
Roman Polanski was charged in 1977 with six crimes related to the s***al assault of a teenager during a photo shoot in Los Angeles but fled America, meaning all the charges are still pending.
He was arrested in Switzerland in 2009 at the request of the US authorities, who wanted to extradite him to face trial.
Following a period of prison, and then house arrest, Switzerland let Roman Polanski go, but he is now unlikely ever to leave France again in case he is re-arrested.
Like Carlo Bruni–Sarkozy, who is the third wife of former French president Nicolas Sarkozy, Emmanuelle Seigner has received a great deal of publicity through her relationship with a world-famous husband.
Frenchwomen are often lauded for their fashion sense, slender figures and perfectly behaved children, but critics have suggested they can be jealous, snobbish and sometimes even hostile.
A new website launched to help British women living in France fit in advises them to turn up late, brush up on current affairs and learn to accept compliments without treating them as a chat-up line.
Roman Polanski’s new film, Venus in Fur, with the director beautiful wife’s Emmanuelle Seigner in female leading role, is adapted from the stage-play by David Ives.
The movie is set continuously in one location: a theatre auditorium in Paris, where a harassed director has just spent a long and disagreeable afternoon auditioning actresses for a new version of Venus In Furs, the Leopold von Sacher-Masoch novel about s***al submission.
The last film screened in competition at Cannes 2013 is a slight, spry comedy of s** and power; a doodle in the festival’s margins, perhaps, but it has certainly been sketched with a flourish.
Roman Polanski has adapted the David Ives play Venus in Fur, which is itself based on a novella by the Austrian author Leopold von Sacher-Masoch.
Emmanuelle Seigner plays Vanda in Roman Polanski’s latest film Venus In Fur
The playwright, Thomas (Mathieu Amalric), has decided to direct his own script, and as the film begins, he is lamenting the lack of suitable actresses for the Vanda role.
“I need a s**y young woman with classical training and a scrap of brain in her skull,” he fumes.
At that moment, an actress blows in through the door, although she is not the erudite gamine of Thomas’s casting-call fantasies. She is in her mid-40s; a blur of blonde hair and blue eyeshadow; and she seems to have only the vaguest idea as to what the text is about. Her name, oddly enough, is Vanda, and she is played by Emmanuelle Seigner.
The shrugging, gum-chewing Vanda seems to be even worse than the others, but after she begs, Thomas is finally persuaded to give her a try – and of course he is astonished by what Vanda comes up with. Soon their relationship begins to change and Roman Polanski shows how Thomas experiences precisely that forbidden frisson celebrated in the novel.
It is a Pygmalion story, in its way, a story of transformation. The director might consider it his prerogative to shape and develop his leading lady in rehearsal. But that is not how Vanda sees it. For all its avowed danger and transgression there is something a little bit dated and even genteel in this theatregoers’ adventure in s**.
[youtube A3yEVufI42A]
Roman Polanski’s wife Emmanuelle Seigner stole the show on the red carpet in Cannes in her plunging red dress.
All eyes were on Emmanuelle Seigner, 46, as she waltzed along the red carpet with her husband in her custom Alexandre Vauthier silk jersey gown which she styled with red Christian Louboutin sandals.
The French actress, who stars in Venus In Fur – Roman Polanski’s adaptation of the David Ives Broadway play, looked vibrant in her dress.
Mother-of-two Emmanuelle Seigner’s dress perfectly showed off her lily white skin and with a slick of red lipstick and minimal make-up the actress certainly upstaged fellow actress Nicole Kidman.
With the chilly breeze blowing her red dress around her legs The Diving Bell and the Butterfly star kept hold of her husband’s hand as they negotiated the red carpet.
The film is about an actress trying to get a director to give her a role.
Roman Polanski’s wife Emmanuelle Seigner stole the show on the red carpet in Cannes in her plunging red dress
It is not Roman Polanski’s only offering in Cannes.
Three years after Senna, the hit film biography of the late Brazilian racing driver Ayrton Senna, sporting documentaries about Jackie Stewart, Muhammad Ali and Pele are competing for attention at the Cannes Film Festival.
In Weekend of a Champion, the Polish-French filmmaker Roman Polanski follows Jackie Stewart, his long-time friend, as he prepares to drive in the 1971 Monaco Grand Prix, at a time when the risks to drivers were far greater than they are now.
Roman Polanski said he had forgotten about the film, which was screened at the Berlin film festival in 1972 but never released, until a recent call from a processing lab holding the footage.
[youtube YTYCxBCvsh8]
