Venus In Furs

[Des Esseintes]

Has anyone else here read Leopold von Sacher-Masoch's Venus In Furs? It's not really a gothic romance but it's fairly close. It's about a love/hate relationship between an inexperienced young man and a hedonistic young woman and it's set in Italy in the late 1800s. It's best remembered for the kinky sex scenes of bondage and whips (now very tame today) but the sex is only secondary to the underlying subtext regarding their relationship. The man (Severin) only wants to serve his lover as a sexual slave but the woman (Wanda) wants a real, emotionally mature relationship. As the novel progresses their relationship deteriorates under their conflicting desires.

I checked online and it looks like nobody has ever made a faithful screenplay of it. I was considering trying my hand at it.

Is anyone here familar with the story?

You can read about it here and you can read the English translation for free here.

[tamtam]

I've never read it or heard of it, but it sounds quite interesting. If you could turn it into a movie, I'd probably go see it. I can even picture it being turned into a play.

[Des Esseintes]

I think a play would be even easier than a movie actually. I've been reviewing the original novel for about a week now and I'm trying to cut a lot of dialogue and show the emotional conflict in actions instead of words. OTOH, most plays are more talkative than movies and if it was a play I could leave more of the dialogue in it.

I don't know. It's just an experiment I started to play with because I was stuck on something more serious I wanted to write. Idealistically, I could find some college film student who wants to make it or maybe some indie film maker. It would make a good "big budget" movie but I know nothing about marketing a script like that and even if I did I have other ideas to market. I sort of wanted Venus In Furs to be a practice run before trying to sell my own ideas.

We'll see what happens I guess.