Bertrand Bonello’s carefully crafted fin de siècle is a baroque free-fall into the environs of a Parisian brothel, where the corporeal realities of sensuality and violence bend to anxieties of fate and freewill. Confined to the closed rococo setting of L’Apollonide, “House of Pleasures” recalls the paintings of post-Impressionist Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec; Bonello’s fifth feature and Toulouse-Lautrec’s portraits (most notably those done on his notorious tours of the Parisian red light district, such as “En la sala de la Rue des Moulins” and “Friends”) are uncanny companions separated by their medium but not by their desire to express truth through frankness—the routine with the glamour, the profession with the fetish. Toulouse-Lautrec may have had the observational advantage, but Bonello uses his hindsight perspective to layer a century of modern pastiche over his images, to beautiful and heartbreaking effect.

"House of Pleasures" opens with an enigma, a prologue where dream and reality blend together bewitchingly. Meandering down a dimly lit hallway, Madeleine (Alice Barnole), nicknamed the Jewess, recounts a dream she had to her client; the diegetic sounds of boredom and clinking champagne glasses lend a doom-y ambience to offset the anecdote's hopeful tenor, which turns out to be a bad omen. Bonello dubs this one night in November of 1899 as “the twilight of the 19th century,” doubling back and providing a full exposition of the evening by lacing together the ensemble like a musical round with hidden cadenzas. The full disclosure of the ennui, the cynicism, the frivolity, the rigors, the decadence and the desires of the ladies in waiting leads to this sadistic nightmare, transforming the Jewess into the Woman Who Laughs, who will haunt the rest of the film like a harbinger into the 20th century.

It’s the beginning of the end for communes of sex, trade and companionship, and L’Apollonide is a microcosm representing these closed systems. Marie-France (Noémie Lvovsky), Madame of the house, is finding it hard to financially maintain her business under the stress of a changing economy. She manages a dozen women, give or take, for discerning clientele, often differentiating her business from those in Marseille with “vermin-ridden mattresses.” Aware of the indentured nature of their stay in this house of pleasure (or house of “tolerance,” as the International title reads), the young women form a tangible community built from a shared empathy for a life that is at once decadent and deprived. And because Bonello avoids the sometimes seemingly irresistible temptation to make prostitutes into politicized victims or martyred heroes, their compassion for each other strikes an unadulterated chord.

End-of-an-era dramas, even those set in brothels, are nothing new; as a matter of fact, “House of Pleasures” shadows the languid melancholy of Hou Hsiao-hsien’s “Flowers of Shanghai” (there's even a nod to an erhu melody, mid-film). 'House' means to represent a day in the life of a high-class prostitute on the upswing of the Belle Époque, but Bonello’s graceful narrative patterns, especially how he chooses to open and close the main of his film, and Josée Deshaies sensuous camerawork, give an edge to the standard period piece. The stylistic license that is likely to be most talked about, however, is the anachronistic music choices that amplify emotions within a theatrical bubble. Specifically, Bonello curates the Mighty Hannibal, Lee Moses, and the Moody Blues with breathtaking perfection. Like the “Sinnerman” remix at the end of “Inland Empire,” “Nights in White Satin” forms a communal bond between “House of Pleasures" and its audience. The difference is that this isn't a bond of celebration, but one of grief; the surprise of that moment and its implicit sentiment was no less overwhelming than the first time I saw Chow Mo-wan whisper a secret into a hole in Angkor Wat near the end of “In the Mood for Love”—both are examples of nonpareil filmmaking where style and substance excel in tandem.

Speaking of this relatively unknown French director in the same breath as Hou Hsiao-hsien, Wong Kar-wai and David Lynch may seem premature, but the arrival of “House of Pleasures”—clearly short-shifted by IFC's on-demand now, theatrical later plan—catapults Bonello into an elite circle of the world’s best filmmakers. He finds the contextual space for the velveteen drama between the familiarity of a pelvic exam and a sunny picnic, and the veracity of gentrification and syphilis. Additionally, he stacks his deck with actors—Hafsia Herzi, Céline Sallette, Iliana Zabet, Jasmine Trinca, Adele Haenel, Barnole and Lvovsky—who exude nuances beyond the extremes of confidence and vulnerability.

Paying off their respective debts and leaving L’Apollonide behind is always a topic of casual conversation and idle fantasy among these women, but it's hard to imagine them existing outside the life support of their current surroundings. Cothilde (Sallette), central to the film’s record of a temporal shift, slowly fades from the others in a haze of opium, brought on by 12 years of labor and the impossibility of falling in love. Marie-France scolds Cothilde, warning her of an unpleasant future if she’s unable to subdue her narcissistic sorrow. As if turning her back on the collective, Cothilde strikes a sacrificial chord of independence, stating she will sell her teeth to pay off her debts and leave L’Apollonide. In a finale of Bastille Day celebration, revenge and dream-induced resolution, the house folds and the red light goes out before Cothilde is given a chance to make good on her threat. But in a jarring epitaph, Bonello flashes forward to the present and Cothilde reappears before us a century later—an echo to a hundred years of so-called progress as one of the world’s oldest professions is carried on.

Review by:
Kathie Smith