Who's Persecuting Who? Roman Polanski's VENUS IN FUR

VENUS IN FUR opens in motion, on a Parisian road,  lined by perfectly paralleled trees.  The camera moves through  increasingly swift paths, moving anxiously towards its end goal.  All the while the treetops open, reaching out and touching one another...a thin branch from the left border of the street meets the thin branch of the right side.  The visual roadmap changing before us, and these impossibly static left and right sides meet  one another's touch, like bending tentacles. They separate as the camera slows, hovering at a theater entrance.

Now we are among people.
How will their common goal connect? How will what was previously hidden about a person come to show it itself? Our masks? Our neuroses, our psychoses?
Is this another great Polanski film about persecution and persecution complexes?
Of course.
But here, we explore these matters by way of Speech.

Polanski sometimes has messy women color his movies. These messy characters are corporeal, blunt.  They are also like white rabbits;
Adjani's mysterious roommate Stella drew THE TENANT's Trelkovsky down a rabbit hole of doubles; all hunted, all victims, all outcasts. They were as literal and historical as they were psychological and neurotic. Seigner's sexually self possessed Mimi of BITTER MOON leads all the characters into a mystery of love and disappearance. In VENUS IN FUR Seigner's Vanda also leads.  She needs to earn his respect and trust before she can lure Thomas.  She allows him to see, through her ability to connect to once hidden parts of himself.
She also shows him a new way to connect to text, and to his relationship as a director.
These properties are nearly mystical/spiiritual, though depicted matter of factly.  She is a seer who leads the blind, not unlike Tess, not unlike Adjani in THE TENANT or Ruth Gordon's Minnie in ROSEMARY'S BABY.

The first time we see Thomas (Almaric) he is overheard speaking on the telephone.  He makes a joke of women today and their frivolity.  The conversation cuts off after he sarcastically jokes he could dress in drag.

In THE TENANT, Trelkovsky's fears and otherness are brought to the forefront when he dresses in drag in a pivotal scene in the film.

Is that what Vanda's character is? Is it Thomas? in drag? Or just another image of him, created or projected from their meeting.

There is a moment in the beginning when we understand that how they speak to one another, and in which voice, will dictate their forward motion, in a psychological sense. We are brought a precise moment where suspense of disbelief concretizes:  Thomas has previously been dismissive of this blowsy actress.  But suddenly  Thomas nearly spins towards her on the stage,now needing his glasses as if to see through something appearing unclear. She is reading a line and he replies to her, grabbing the book...
He  believes her in the role.
And in turn, he is willing to play his part.

This new  film too is about what is created when things brush against one another, when they line up, as do the left and right sides of the tree lined street.  Between men and women, between the actor and the author, between the artist and the audience, connections are revealed that change the look of the road.