As likely to be heralded in certain circles as a preeminent figure of stylish erotic Eurohorror as he is to be dismissed as a hack-of-all-trades and purveyor of Eurotrash, often both at the same time given his gargantuan and largely uneven filmography and depending where your affections lie, Jesus Franco if nothing else at least can't be brushed aside easily. If Oasis of the Zombies gives valid claim to the second, Venus in Furs does the same with the first.
A jazz player discovers the body of a woman washed up in a beach in Istanbul. Weirdness ensues. Not really 'meaningful' weird, the kind of weird that suggests a certain insight to be gleaned from closer inspection, but 'captivating' weird, 'hallucinogenic' weird, the kind of weird where you buy the ticket and are happy to be simply swept along for the ride. The movie seems disjointed at first, haphazard, low-key voice-over narration transporting us through time and space back and forth until plot and story cease to exist in any one given level. Yet it doesn't take long for a sort of inner rhythm and flow, jazzlike and hypnotic, to emerge. Suddenly we're in a ritzy party and Klaus Kinski is peering wide-eyed into the camera. The dead woman is now alive, scantily dressed and being flogged in a dimly lit basement by Kinski and two of his friends. From Istanbul to Rio back to Istanbul, the strange woman seems to be exacting some kind of revenge while she keeps a love affair with the horn player on the side.
For all the casual languid randomness, Franco seems to know what he's doing. Not narrative speaking so much as in terms of atmosphere and overall ambiance. The camera constantly zooms back and forth, the movie pulsating with a jazz vibrato. Shots from the primary narrative (the actual story) are later repeated inside a flashback (fantasy? reverie?) making the boundaries between present and past tense blur hopelessly, turning the linear into cyclical. Something which is further compounded by the bizarre ending where I think Franco reaches for more than he can grasp and comes up mostly with straws. That combined with the little epigraph superimposed over the screen brings the movie down a notch because it reduces the heady surreal noir that precedes it into a "so it was all..." conclusion. By openly stating what we've been suspecting, that everything exists in someone's head and adheres to the fragmented laws of dreams and memory, Franco robs us of the pleasure of understanding for ourselves.
Thirty years down the line Venus in Furs is more likely to appeal to fans of Alain Robbe-Grillet and David Lynch than Eurohorror hounds, the emphasis here being on mysterious rather than grotesque.
