House Of Tolerance

Brothelly Love

House Of Tolerance
aka House Of Pleasures
aka L'Apollonide
(Souvenirs de la maison close)
France 2011 Directed by Bertrand Bonello
Universal DVD Region 2

House Of Tolerance is a movie about a bunch of sex workers in a brothel in Paris at the turn of the century. The film is presented as a series of episodes of the daily cummings and goings of the girls at the establishment, named L’Apollonide and it’s actually a very well put together film.

Each of a large number of characters, maybe ten girls, is touched upon and, there’s no real story arc as much as a group of incidents that play out which, ultimately, forces the house to close its doors with many of the girls not easily finding employment elsewhere, due to the pressure from the landlord to pay more to the establishment. We have a small first section, involving one of the main girls called Madeleine. She tells a client who she wants to marry about a dream she had the night before about him proposing and then coming inside her, the force of his love filling her up to the point where she starts crying thick tears of his semen from her eyes. It’s an evocative image and, while this remains in the dream for now, there’s a scene near the end of the picture where the disfigured Madeleine (I’ll get to that in just a minute) is seen surrealistically crying tears of semen, rolling down her cheeks and over her unnaturally extended mouth... oh yeah, about that.

After he listens to her story, the client asks to tie her up and then, when she can’t do anything about it, he slits both sides of her mouth with a knife, causing a permanent wound reminiscent of the famous Black Dahlia killing. Well, I say Black Dahlia but the director has gone on to say that he was inspired by Conrad Viedt’s slash mouthed look in the 1928 film The Man Who Laughs and the pathos of Madeleine’s character and presence throughout the film... she’s kept on as the brothel’s cook, washer woman, seamstress etc...  is certainly reminiscent of that kind of character. However, since I’m pretty sure the unknown killer of Betty Short in the 1940s was probably inspired by the same thing, I’m gonna plump for the Dahlia here.

This first segment is titled on the screen as November 1899 - The Twilight Of The 19th Century but we quickly enter the other, much longer segment of the movie, March 1900 - The Dawn Of The 20th Century, shortly after our first glimpse of the facial mutilation (which is revisited a few times as the director seems to have a modus operandi of repeating parts of scenes over from different angles or with different details shared... and not just in the usual flashback style sequences, although they do happen too).

And it’s really interesting as we see the girls’ day to day with various incidents such as one girl being given a  champagne bath by a client, another forced to dress and act like a mechanical doll, another thrown into a geisha costume etc. Even Madeleine still gets in on the occasional action as one client in particular has a fetish about her facial mutilation (cue eventual orgy scene with a stripped and pampered Madelaine with a dwarf girl). We also see the problems and trials of the working girls’ lives as we see a periodical medical examination, one girl addicted to opium and another who contracts syphilis and eventually dies in the brothel. The metaphor towards the end of the movie where a petal falls from a flower is okay once but, not so hot when it’s repeated and pushed as the same metaphor a minute or so later, to be honest.

It’s well shot too. The director moves the camera very slowly, the only jarring edits being on the soundtrack when the score suddenly drops out on a cut on occasion (I’ll get to the music in a minute). So things will move very slowly in a voyeuristic manner as girls and clients move in and out of shot without the director necessarily following them.

He also likes splitting up the action and showing things simultaneously.

There are a few split sequences where either four different locations in each quarter of the screen or, in one case, a trio of them splitting the screen vertically... which sometimes show a girl moving out of one location and turning up in another a short time after. He also tends to like the use of vertical splits discovered by the camera as a natural part of single shot compositions too... which is nothing new but it does seem like he’s trying to experiment with ways of echoing his split screen shots in a more naturalistic (but of course, artificially manipulated) setting.

For example, a shot of a room taken from behind two big open doorways leading into the room means there is a vertical split created by their frames as a column in the middle of the space is used to delineate various clusters of actors. In this shot he then slowly moves the character through the right hand of the two openings, bringing the scenario together as the doorframes leave the picture. In another example of splitting the screen naturally, he has a girl undress in front of a client but, most of the back wall of the room they are in is comprised of flush strips of vertical mirrors, each reflecting the disrobing from slightly different angles within the same shot.

The ending, which includes a possible (or is it an opium dream?) come uppance for the man who mutilated Madeleine in a scene where the other girls lock him in a room with one of the other client’s small pet panther (I don’t think it’s an ocelot but I may be wrong) and also the wonderful moment where Madeleine cries tears of thick semen down her disfigured features... takes us on over a hundred years to the present day, where streetwalkers are plying their trade in the very same streets of Paris where the brothel stood (at least one of them played by one of the same actresses from the brothel).

My one real problem with the film was the use of music. The opening titles after a short sequence, which consists of a series of black and white photos of the girls in a montage, has a song on it which sounds like it came from the 1950s or some such. It’s totally out of period and completely manages to kill the mood, as it does when it and another out of place song appear on the soundtrack during a couple of scenes. Also, the scoring is sparse but quite odd and out of tone with the piece, I thought. It also feels badly spotted, like the director and composer couldn’t best decide which areas of the film should have music and which should be left unscored.. most of it is left without music which, given the inappropriate nature of some of the cues I was hearing, is perhaps for the better.

However, the music doesn’t ruin the movie and I’d have to say I had a really good time with House Of Tolerance. If this film had been made in the 1970s or 1980s it would probably have played the Lumiere cinema to much acclaim and for a number of weeks, I would bet. And, it has to be said, it does have the feel of a 1980s movie looking back to the past, I thought. Anyway, this film needs to be a little better known and appreciated, I think, so in regards to that I’ll just say that if you want to see a movie with lots of bosomy women walking around naked for a lot of the time, then this is one to take a look at.