Wet male fantasies live in this body: the wicked rock’n’roll eroticism of a Kate Moss, but with a French accent on her lips and a little more flesh on her ribs. And Emmanuelle Seigner knows how to showcase this. Certainly also in the marriage bed she shares with a convicted child molester.
As if the Stooges had teamed up with Brigitte Bardot: archaic riffs cut through the lyrics, one of which reads: “Someone drank my blood like a glass of wine.” Minimalism in image and sound, a clip in black and white, three people, one microphone. A blonde scrub hangs from it, but not the emaciated leather skin of Iggy Pop, but a woman’s body in a little white dress, twitching to the beat of the electric guitar like an eel on a hook. Has the French indie duo Ultra Orange recruited a singing luxury groupie to back them up? Not quite. Behind the Lolita is something like the first lady of arthouse cinema. And the punk aesthetic suits her perfectly. “Money eats creativity,” she says in a TV interview. Flashback to 1983, blonde mane again, white dress again. But here Emmanuelle Seigner is 17 years young. In the digital memory known as YouTube, there are clips of the casting, which marks the transition from catwalk to film. The men’s world is definitely left salivating when the girl, who has matured into a vamp, nibbles Harrison Ford to Grace Jones’ version of “Libertango” in 1988. The film is called “Frantic” and Roman Polanski is the director. That’s right; the same Polanski who is on the wanted list in the USA for child abuse. And he is committed to his 33 years younger (but still of age) muse until death do them part. Or the divorce judge, which is not foreseeable. The couple live happily on the Rue de Montaigne in Paris, between the Champs Elysées and the promenade, with Chanel and Dior as neighbors. Except Polanski is currently imprisoned in shackles in his Swiss mountain chalet. The 2009 arrest interlude, he says, was more dramatic for the family than for himself. In other words, for the children Morgane and Elvis. The madame, she’ll be fine. Career-wise, too. After a little help from her husband (he cast her in “Bitter Moon”, 1992 or “The Ninth Gate”, 1999), she emancipated herself. As a musician and as an actress. She interprets songs from chanson to Velvet Underground, and was nominated for a César in 2007 for the Piaf biopic “La Vie En Rose”.
Just like this February, as the leading actress in a far more delicate project: “Venus In Furs”. Polanski directs the sexually charged novel by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, the eponym of the word “masochism”: Seigner, styled as a softcore dominatrix, wraps poor Mathieu Amalric around her lacquered fingernail. A play with clichés and role models reduced to two people and a fur coat. “With the woman in the perpetrator role,” emphasizes the blonde fury. As a kind of silver wedding anniversary present – 25 years, in fact – the jury did not reward the lady, but her husband, with the César for Best Director. What the heck. It stays in the family.
“Venus in Fur” (Ascot Elite) will be released on 28. March on DVD.
