Seduction: The Cruel Woman (German title Verführung: Die grausame Frau) is a 1985 West German art film, co-directed and co-written by Elfi Mikesch and Monika Treut. It sits among the European SM films of the mid-1980s that carry a lesbian coloring, and it is treated as queer art cinema. The story is openly taken from Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s Venus in Furs. That book feeds the plot, and the same literary root later gave psychology the word for masochism. The people on screen are adults, inside a closed world of power, desire, and death.
Mechthild Großmann plays Wanda, a dominatrix who runs a gallery in Hamburg. The room shows art, and it is also the stage where she makes her sadomasochistic world public. She draws in men and women of every kind. Spectators buy a ticket before they are allowed to watch her humiliate her slaves. The SM is performance art and a sale at the same time. She turns her American female lover into an assistant-Mistress. Another lover stays near her: older, tender, a shoe fetishist, motherly. The cast list also includes Udo Kier as Gregor, Sheila McLaughlin as Justine, and Carola Regnier as Caren. Those names are not pinned, in the material this piece is drawn from, to the American lover, the shoe-fetishist lover, or the husband.
The husband who is also the slave
The ending stirs eros and thanatos together and does not soften the cruelty. When Wanda is finally shot, the killer is not her American female lover, and not the older shoe-fetishist lover. It is her husband, and the husband is also her slave. Commentary describes the joy on her face as absolute, almost impossible to name. Death arrives as the ultimate scene, rather than as a moral punishment.
The film played the Forum section of the 1985 Berlin International Film Festival, and the same year the San Francisco International Lesbian and Gay Film Festival. That placement frames it as queer arthouse SM, not straight softcore. The related shelf runs through Venus in Furs, other work by Treut and Mikesch, and sadism and masochism in 1980s German underground queer film. You watch it for Wanda’s gallery, where people pay to see cruelty, and for the husband-slave who ends the scene.
