Wanda

Venus in Furs (1969)

For me, everything ended a long time ago.

The basic question that is pondered narratively by Jimmy is how could he make love to, see, touch, talk to, and feel the embrace of Wanda when she’s dead. He asks her who she is, even, perhaps just to get an answer from her own lips. She doesn’t seem to know who she is but does recognize her “end”. Jimmy wonders if he is dead. How can he communicate and identify a woman who washed up on the beach dead in Istanbul unless he was dead as well? It was strange…and that is kind of the spell of Venus in Furs, isn’t it? What do we see? Is anything we see definitive save maybe the initial rape and attack on Wanda? The whole point of “surreal” is to challenge us with what we see on screen. The appeal is that we’re not sure what is real and what isn’t. Jimmy is a character who seems adrift, in a sense, and questions everything and anything because of Wanda. She is the catalyst in his insecure grasp of the real.