MOVIE REVIEW : ‘Seduction’: Of Human Bondage

Wanda, the darkly beautiful, deeply sensual heroine of “Seduction: The Cruel Woman” (at the Nuart Saturday through Monday), is the Robert Mapplethorpe of dominatrices. It’s not for nothing that she refers to her house of pain and pleasure as a gallery and perceives herself as a performance artist. “To do something really surprising is art,” she declares to a male journalist whose intended research has led to his self-discovery as a masochist.

Inspired by by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s “Venus in Furs,” Elfi Mikesch and Monika Treut’s ambitious and complex film is constantly surprising. To begin with, it is quite chaste, with the activities of the gallery implied rather than depicted, despite all the standard bondage and domination gear and attitudes in evidence. For Wanda, as with Mapplethorpe, art and sex--especially along its wilder shores--are one and the same. For Mikesch, who is also the film’s inventive cinematographer, and Treut, best known for the recent “Virgin Machine,” sadomasochism is the starting point for a consideration of the paradoxes at the heart of human nature and desires and of all relationships. “Seduction: The Cruel Woman” is decidedly more philosophical than erotic, for all its tableaux of sexual fantasy.

We would expect Wanda to be a ravishing enigma and her gallery to exist apart from the world. Yet Pina Bausch dancer Mechtild Grossmann’s Wanda is a very human figure of fantasy, as seductive and bemused as silent vamp Nita Naldi and sometimes as lewd as Brigitte Helm’s False Maria in “Metropolis.” Love may be an illusion to Wanda, but it’s unquestionably hard work.

“Love is tiring . . . like working in a salt mine,” she says wearily. Exhausted and suffering a headache, she is comforted by the tender lovemaking of her current No. 1 lover, an elegant middle-aged woman who is a shoe-fetishist. Most tiresome to her is a “slave” (Fassbinder star Udo Kier) who breaks the rules and falls in love with her. As for the gallery, situated in an old warehouse on the Hamburg waterfront, there is enough traffic noise to remind us that all that happens there is actually part of everyday life.

“Seduction: The Cruel Woman” proceeds with the languorous pace and campy tone characteristic of the more outre examples of the New German Cinema. These aspects point up the absurdities of obsessive sexual passion since, on one level, the film is a comedy, yet on another level it is deeply compassionate. Finally, the film makers’ attempt at integrating sex, no matter how kinky, with all other aspects of our beings succeeds in their creating a film that is the antithesis of pornography.

Also on the bill is Treut’s scruffy, lighthearted “Virgin Machine,” about a young Hamburg woman who discovers her true nature in San Francisco’s lesbian community.