For the
sake of not having to write the same intro a million
different ways throughout the rest of time, just know that
this column avoids the overly long and sometimes dull
process of full film reviews and instead opts to break
things down based on what I thought going in, what happened
while I was there and what I learned at the end of it all.
Thanks for reading!
The
Breakdown - House Of Pleasures
The Impression:
I read the words "sumptuous", "19th century" and "brothel"
and was sold on the spot.
The Reality:
Let’s be honest for a moment: my main urges to see House
of Pleasures were pretty base. I’d heard the film was a
pretty dense account of what occurred in one particular 19th
century brothel and I’d heard that the film was rife with
attractive French women completely unclothed. God help me if
I can resist the one-two punch of decent film and plentiful
nudity. And yes, there is an impressive amount of nudity in
the film (I can only think of one or two scenes that doesn’t
have an errant breast or two bopping about) but, as one
might expect from an art film, the nudity doesn’t exactly
titillate. Instead director Bertrand Bonello gives what
accounts to the creative non-fiction version of 19th century
Parisian brothel. The plot is loose - a brothel full of
women live their lives in the confines of the brothel - and
the camera work akin to a certain dirty insect on a wall and
it seems exactly the way Bonello wants it. Oh sure, there’s
moments of eroticism destined to be squinted at through fuzz
lines by twelve year old boys (the champagne sex scene) but
it’s really a pretty straight forward, extremely somber
account of the ups (female companionship) and downs
(everything else including facial knifings, a variety of
sexually transmitted diseases, and the lingering fear that
you will probably live and die a whore) of a high-end
prostitute one hundred years ago. Strangely enough though
you see so much of the women on screen, I struggle to place
faces with names, as if Bonello’s aim was to broadcast the
faceless nature of this age-old profession. If so, he has
succeeded.
The Lesson:
My 13 year old self still lives on within me, and artsy
eroticism just doesn’t do it for him.
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