House of Pleasures (2011)

Surprisingly incoherent and boring

It's fun, it's light, [but] it has a hard time when its tries to get heavy.

If you like to be scared, if you like to laugh, and if you like to learn a thing or two at the movies, this absolutely cannot be missed.

Story: It's very simple but honestly that is fine.

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.

This film is physically gorgeous and the content is hideous. Some reviews here have said that the nudity of the women is "boring" (because it is not used to provoke the audience's sexual response, but rather to reinforce the women's place as "objects"?) and another found the film soporific because of its slow pace, repeated images, and lack of "action." What was needed? A carriage chase (since car chases wouldn't have been possible), or perhaps a daring robbery? In fact,the slow pace of the film reiterates the slow death of the women. The fact that some of the reviewers complain that the film doesn't contextualize the story enough only speaks to our general lack of education about history or the world beyond our own i-pods and pads. Only in the 20th century do most women begin to achieve "rights" and freedoms (and at great cost). And that century is only beginning at the end of this film. For that matter, the film's ending--in contemporary Paris at the historic site of the brothel--implies that those rights and freedoms are easily erased for some.For those who want more action (slashing someone's face is apparently not enough), this film will disappoint. For anyone who is interested in the history of the era and this aspect of Parisian (and European) life, it's a must see. All the slow scenes in the brothel with "gentlemen" clients and prostitutes are framed during the same period as the Dreyfus case, the beginning of the decline of French power and prestige. This film shows the darker side of much that is revealed in Proust's work (which is, after all, rather dark itself). It is definitely a disturbing film, but worth seeing.The women actors works wonderfully together, and the production values are impressive.

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.

It's difficult to determine the target audience for this entry, if indeed there is one. There is one short scene involving full frontal nudity but this involves an applicant for a job in the brothel displaying her body for the madam so that there is no erotic content whatsoever. Elsewhere there are liberal helpings of naked breasts but again with a palpable lack of eroticism so we can rule out the dirty mac brigade. Bonello - who has something of a penchant for making films with a sexual content - Tiresia, The Pornographer - seems almost to be making a documentary recording life in a maison close during the years 1899-1900. This was, of course, the era known as the Belle Epoque but instead of rich, sumptuous colours, Bonello gives us muted, even drab colour photography and perversely shows us a girl with a tattoo - in 1899? - and introduces raucous rock music which clashes totally with the mood which verges on the serene - clearly Baz Luhrmann has a lot to answer for. With the exception of Moemie Chomsvsky, herself a gifted director and fine actress, as the madam, the cast is more or less unknown and appear to have been selected on the basis that they have (presumably) 19th century faces. By definition anyone who actually remembered the year 1899 would be around 120 today so there is no one to say Bonello hasn't got it right which still leaves the question, why bother.