House of Pleasures

From social pariahs to sources of desire, sex workers have been given countless labels. Society and art have characterized them as deviants, criminals, disease-spreaders, and victims; elsewhere, they are empowered by their sexuality, maintain hearts of gold, or represent entrepreneurs in the so-called world’s oldest profession. Despite the range of available stereotypes, director Bertrand Bonello resists all of them in House of Pleasures, a deeply humanist work from 2011 that reconsiders the lives of sex workers with notes of realism yet no shortage of poetic license. The original French title, L’Apollonide: Souvenirs de la maison close, refers to the name of the film’s early 20th-century Parisian brothel, evoking a sanctuary of beauty and pleasure by alluding to the Greek god Apollo. The latter part of the title denotes “memories from the closed house,” employing a French euphemism for a brothel and underscoring the filmmaker’s intent to give a personal account from the sex workers’ perspective. As ever, Bonello resists crystallizing his subjects by neither romanticizing nor condemning them, preferring instead to consider their time between work, the textures they inhabit, the joys and humiliations they endure, and, above all, their layers of humanity. 

The house in the film is a veritable consignment shop made to look like an erotic sanctuary, where Bonello intentionally avoids a clear understanding of its spatial geography. Run by Marie-France (Noémie Lvovsky), the madam, L’Apollonide is situated on a respectable Paris boulevard and visited by well-to-do men. Stepping inside, visitors see marble statues and floors, paintings in a welcoming foyer from which the clientele heads upstairs to a salon. There, women in semi-transparent dresses, frilly garments, and nylons inhabit a room of bearskins, round sofas, nude paintings, mirrors, ornate drapes, and oriental rugs. The electric lighting on the main floor gives way to more enigmatic candlelight on the higher floors. One of the regulars brings a black leopard on a leash, which might be a cruel joke meant to symbolize how he views his nocturnal companions—tamed animals there for his amusement. To be sure, after acquiring their permit, the madam’s workers have few freedoms. She takes a cut of their earnings and charges them for room and board, regular medical inspections, and necessities such as perfumes and antiseptic soaps. Most will remain in debt to her, unable to free themselves from their contract unless, maybe, some client who has fallen in love decides to rescue them. It’s a system rigged against them, and even while feeling like prisoners, they do not rebel against their warden. 

Drawing from public writing, scholarship, and private diaries of the era, Bonello imbues House of Pleasures with an authentic look into this hidden world, which has long been a source of representation and debate in French culture. Charles Baudelaire, Gustave Flaubert, and many others wrote extensively on the role of prostitutes in their contemporary Paris, not only because sex work became increasingly visible in their time but also because the topic had saturated sociopolitical discourse. Women’s bodies became a topic of largely male journalists, commentators, and politicians, who regarded them as fantasies but also potentially diseased and, therefore, symbolizing a threat of Freudian castration in the popular psychoanalytic parlance of the day. In a typical double standard, prostitutes were deemed morally debauched and brothels were sites of carnal temptation. As detailed in Charles Bernheimer’s 1989 book Figures of Ill Repute: Representing Prostitution in Nineteenth-Century France, all of these misogynist projections, evidenced in texts and paintings from the period, spring from religious, social, and psychoanalytic ideology, seeking to associate sex workers with otherness. Bonello’s script directly references one such example with the era’s criminologist Pauline Tarnowsky, who, in an 1899 publication, absurdly argued that criminals and prostitutes share the same characteristically small heads, and thus have “less brain matter.” 

Few sources from the time consider the lives of sex workers without moral or (faux) scientific judgment. Bonello’s intent for the project was to show what other representations did not. He remarked to Film Comment that literature and paintings usually only portray “what happened between 10 p.m. and 6 a.m. Many painters have depicted that setting, as well as several novellas, but mostly from the point of view of men, and therefore from a nocturnal point of view. I wanted to show what these women did between 6 a.m. and 10 p.m.” The result is a reflective film, rooted in real experiences, recalling Lizzie Borden’s Working Girls (1986) in its frank, unflinching view of prostitution, peeking behind the curtain of a high-class brothel (not a “knocking shop,” as the madam clarifies) to reveal a de-sensualized experience. House of Pleasures includes scenes of gynecological exams, professional advice, and support among intimate friends—a unique sisterhood that forms inside L’Apollonide’s curious bubble. 

Bonello doesn’t fashion a conventional story. Like much of his work, he tends to explore the aura or energy of his subject, creating an impression of his characters and their spaces without pinpointing how to interpret them. In that sense, House of Pleasures also has much in common with Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s Flowers of Shanghai (1998), about nineteenth-century brothels in Shanghai, where nearly every scene unfolds in a single shot and most of the characters occupy an opium-induced haze. One of the sex workers in Bonello’s film, Clotilde (Céline Sallette), a 28-year-old woman who has been at L’Apollonide for 12 years and sees no end in sight, has become an opium addict, smoking to make her job “easier.” But otherwise, during working hours, the women maintain a low-level buzz from champagne, just enough to take the edge off and keep their spirits high. At other times, they must laugh through their circumstances. An amusing scene finds them questioning what a brothel for women would be—certainly not dominated by the same insecurities their male clients have about penis size.

House of Pleasures introduces several women, each with a subplot. But it’s newcomer Pauline (Iliana Zabeth), a young girl in her mid-teens who writes to the madam for a job, who comes looking for freedom and independence but soon realizes that L’Apollonide is a cage. For instance, bathing in champagne sounds like a sexy fantasy until you realize it’s cold, and copulation in a metal bathtub is awkward and causes bruising—what’s more, the cleanup afterward is sticky. Pauline is warned not to rack up debt or she will never escape. And should a prostitute ever earn her freedom, what would await them? The film suggests that few men would want a former prostitute as a wife, and few sex workers ever want to make love again after getting out of their métier. Far from erotic, Bonello’s treatment emphasizes the transactional nature of what occurs: “Shall we have commerce?” is the line the workers use to initiate with their clientele. But if they want their freedom, three customers a day isn’t enough; perhaps with four or five, the women might be able to save enough to pay their debts. Fortunately, Pauline realizes the setup before she’s unable to leave. 

Central to the film is Alice Barnole, who plays Madeleine, a Jewish woman who feels connected to a recurring client (Laurent Lacotte) and even dreams about him rescuing her with the gift of a large emerald. After Madeleine tells him about her dreams, he asks to tie her up and then caresses her with a knife. She asks him to stop, but he responds, “I’m paying, so I decide.” He goes even further, moving the knife into Madeleine’s mouth, where the blade clacks against her teeth with a horrible sound. Then he pulls the blade through her cheek in a manner inspired by Victor Hugo’s 1869 novel, The Man Who Laughs. While writing his script, the image from Paul Leni’s 1928 silent film based on Hugo’s book had haunted Bonello’s dreams. It becomes a lasting motif in the film, echoing Conrad Veidt’s iconic character: a tragic figure seen only for the warped smile carved into his face as a child. Likewise, Madeleine earns the cruel nickname “The Woman Who Laughs.” If Lacotte’s actions weren’t sadistic enough, it’s worth questioning whether they were at all a reflection of France’s notoriously antisemitic culture—perhaps a response to the outcome of the Dreyfus Affair, which is discussed among L’Apollonide’s clientele before the incident. 

Later, a makeshift freak show hosted by twisted elites invites Madeleine to attend so they can ogle her scars. It’s an apt metaphor for how some view sex workers not as people but as inhuman things. Note how Léa (Adèle Haenel) has a popular doll routine, where she shuts down her mind and acts like a lifeless automaton for one of her clients. Indeed, Madeleine’s new face is like a mask, and masks, ever recurring in Bonello’s cinema, play a significant role in the climactic masked party sequence during Bastille Day, marking the L’Apollonide’s last hurrah before new renter’s rates force the madam to close. Even Madeleine wears a mask to hide her scars, similar to the one Edith Scob’s scarred character wears in Eyes Without a Face (1960), while the man who scarred her wears a mask like the one Tom Cruise rents in Eyes Wide Shut (1999). If Lacotte’s character receives some measure of comeuppance when they trap him in a room with the black leopard, it’s brief; Bonello doesn’t pretend to give these women a happy ending or full catharsis. In the end, Madeleine still cries tears of semen, as she dreamed she would. The closure of L’Apollonide will force some of the workers onto the streets. 

Though on the surface House of Pleasures looks like a conventional period film, Bonello’s aesthetic treatment regularly breaks patterns and deploys contrasts to incite the audience to think critically about the subject. Sharp bursts of 20th-century rock and roll music interrupt the costume drama mode, setting the tone with The Moody Blues’ aching “Nights in White Satin” and other songs that support Bonello’s subtle score (he was a musician before becoming a filmmaker). Several sequences find Bonello and editor Fabrice Rouaud using split screens—a triptych of vertical panels for one sequence, four quadrants for others—to consider the range of activities in a brothel, besides the obvious. Still, production designer Alain Guffroy and costume designer Anaïs Romand contribute to a handsome presentation, filled with lavish colors and rich lighting. The director works with cinematographer Josée Deshaies to compose images like the chiaroscuro paintings by Caravaggio and Gerard van Honthorst—full of high-contrast lighting, dark backgrounds, and illuminated flesh. Only one scene occurs outside of the brothel when the women visit the river together. In contrast to the dramatic interiors, the scene is like something from a Pierre-Auguste Renoir painting. Such beauty stands in opposition to the reality on display. 

Classical painting influences the look of Bonello’s film not only in his use of color but also in how he draws from classical symbolism. During the Bastille Day party, he shows petals wilting from a white rose. But even as House of Pleasures has moments of artful beauty shot on luscious 35mm film stock, the director cuts into those moments with the final scene shot on a MiniDV camera, leaping forward in time to a twenty-first century look at sex workers on the streets of Paris. Céline Sallette, who plays Clotilde, emerges from a car, as though her character has spent the last hundred years in the same routine. These conversations haven’t changed much in the last century or more, Bonello notes. And most of the debate ignores the human toll on women, who have no system or laws to protect them. Whether it’s in servitude to L’Apollonide, to a pimp on the street, or as an independent escort, society prefers to ignore and condemn them rather than create laws or an infrastructure to protect them. Bonello looks at these women with staggering empathy, and his excellent cast delivers layered, nuanced performances with their characters. Although difficult to endure for the many displeasures it explores, House of Pleasures may be Bonello’s most human film.

(Note: This review was originally suggested and posted to Patreon on July 30, 2024.)