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France · 2011
2h 2m
Director Bertrand Bonello
Starring Noémie Lvovsky, Hafsia Herzi, Céline Sallette, Jasmine Trinca
Genre Drama
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A young woman begins a new life at the Apollonide bordello, a high-class brothel in Paris.
Like Walter Benjamin, Bonello associates this insularity with both innocence and the 19th century; and when, in the final sequence of House of Pleasures, he dispenses with the security exuded by these subjects, the effect is like being shaken violently out of a dream.
The result is erratic, occasionally WTF hilarious (three words: revenge by panther!), and in its transgressive tracks-of-my-tears climax, capable of finding pleasure in being bat-shit crazy.
The filmmaker gives full vent to his romanticism by staging an End of the Epoch party, with tearful sex workers dancing to "Nights in White Satin," then steps on the mood with yet another farewell fête, commemorating Bastille Day. The prisoners are free - to walk the streets. Ironic, no?
San Francisco Chronicle by Mick LaSalle
It's a strange film, very original and very good. Just by virtue of the subject matter, it can't help but be erotic, and yet eroticism is not the movie's purpose.
Chicago Sun-Times by Roger Ebert
No one, male or female, has any fun, but the men behave as if they do. They are all half-stupefied by the languor in which they drown.
Without soft-pedaling it in the least, Bonello nonetheless mourns the passing of a time where prostitutes didn't control their destinies, but at least had each other.
The New York Times by Stephen Holden
Throughout the film there is an abundance of sumptuously photographed flesh on view. But House of Pleasures is not an erotic stimulant so much as a slow-moving, increasingly tragic and claustrophobic operatic pageant set almost entirely in the brothel.
Despite copious full-frontal female nudity, House of Pleasures isn't mere sexploitation. Rather, it's a gorgeously filmed portrait of a bygone era, with painstaking attention to period detail. On the downside, the movie is overlong.
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