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.

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