House of Pleasures (2011)

It was a long, hard slog, trying to get through this story of a French whorehouse and its staff during la belle époque. A poor sixteen-year-old applies, and is accepted into, the bordello. She's the audience proxy. The other ladies teach her the tricks of the trade. On the whole, it might have been written by a French anthropologist. The writer/director is determined to show us how this system works. I admire Levi-Strauss but I could never understand him. I think I understand this movie, though. It's just that it's so dull.It might have helped if any of the characters were at all animated but they're not. They're, how you say, blasé. It would also have helped if there were even one girl who was beautiful enough to coagulate your eyeballs. Instead, one of the most prominent of the ladies has a nose on her that suggests she should be hovering over a grassy field, wings fluttering, searching for mice.On the plus side, a good deal of attention is paid to period detail. The production crew must have studied Toulouse-Lautrec with a microscope, and it turned out pretty atmospheric. We have the rosy cheeks, the scented soap, and those endearing black chokers that girls of the period used to wear and that -- come to think of it -- Natalie Portman wore in "Léon: The Professional." Whatever happened to black chokers anyway? They were very sexy. Everything seems to be changing for the worse. The old days are gone forever.I'm joking around because, I expect, I have nothing much more to say about the film. I retired from anthropology some years ago and am fed up with tribal studies.You want to see a decent whorehouse movie? See "Pretty Baby," also directed by a Frenchman, Louis Malle, in 1978. The setting is New Orleans in 1917, but it's very French in its approach to whoredom, and New Orleans was still rather a French city with monolingual French speakers. Degas visited relatives there. The set design is equally evocative. And it has drama as well as nudity. This one has only nudity.

It's hard to believe that no reviewer connects Bonello's (inferior) movie with the novel "Yama" ("The Pit") by the lesser - though still great - Russian realist Alexandr I. Kuprin ; even the "original" ending is pure Kuprin transferred to more distant future : times are getting worse, brothels closing, impoverished madams packing... soon the facade of the house changes completely, and all those girls named so and so run their own way lost in a big city, becoming a new kind of prostitutes : lonely street nomads .... Watching "L'Apollonide" I tried in vain to be entertained or swept by it, to like the "Nights in White Satin" gimmick, or the brutal visualizing of the " tears of sperm" metaphor, or the sequence of the mutilation structured a la Nichols'"Catch-22".

I'm giving this a 10 because not only was the costuming excellent, the set (even in one house) was well done with period artwork and decor. It had a story: the bond between these woman. It had subtleties as to where the story was headed (watch for falling rose petals) It had a message: prostitution, whether in a fancy brothel or on a street.corner in the modern day, often is hard emotionally on the woman. The physical dangers, depression, and even drug use occurs regardless of the century. Prostitution may be the oldest profession, but it comes with the oldest pitfalls. (Not a spoiler as it is mentioned in the plot summary): By switching to a cut of a young girl getting out of a car in modern day Paris and joining the other working girls on the street corner...the message, or moral of the story was neatly tied together. The movie wasn't about the sex; it was about the progression killing these girls, from the inside out.

I wouldn't have believed it, but it's true.Beautiful naked women parade around the screen for just over two hours. And yet it is just plain tedious.Nothing happens in this film. It's unrelievedly gloomy, the girls are all depressed, none of them like sex, and the men all want to do bizarre things with them. We don't learn much about many of the girls.We learn little or nothing about the legal or social system in which the maison close operated, i.e., what was legal and what was not.I really do not understand what the point of the film was.Avoid it.