Critics reviews

This film is where Bonello becomes one of the great directors of the 21st century, because of the risks he takes that make him so hard for some minds to embrace.

The director extends his greatest compassion to the employees—prisoners, really—of the Apollonide, the opulent Belle Epoque Parisian bordello of House of Pleasures (2011). Featuring some of France's greatest millennial actresses (Adèle Haenel, Céline Sallette) among its doxy ensemble, the film sates the senses with its luxe decor and impeccably arranged, languid bodies. Although the mise-en-scène may be sumptuous, Bonello has no interest in glorifying the profession.

Bertrand Bonello's 2011 masterpiece House of Pleasures was itself a minor-scale tremor sent echoing across the world film circuit, a vivid, audacious vision of the incremental degradation of the female spirit and a work, in its own way, as unsettling as anything our modern cataclysmic cinema has given us.

It left me a bit cold and appreciative on only an intellectual level. And then, in the film's final moments, modern-day coda, a brief detail that turns the film into a much larger story about modernity, capitalism, exchange, workers, and the lives of women eaten up by a machine that turns humans into exchanged commodities but legislates against their solidarity and defense. Devastated, overwhelmed, unable to stifle enormous tears, I wept, uncontrollably, long through the credits.

Clearly Bonello is suggesting that they are more or less elegant slaves. But generally he leaves us to our own thoughts. They are not always favourable towards this rather passive film, but it does linger in the mind.

While some of my colleagues were more carried away by the film's seductive, dirge-like rhythms, I found myself craving something more, some other chords for Bonnello to strum—though it could have just been that I couldn't tune into his particular frequency. Also, the video coda, real-life footage of the girls' present-day counterparts, seemed like a sudden, 11th-hour lapse into the prosaic, as well as the pedantic.

The film boasts a wildly imaginative style, employing trick shots, split screens, symbolic sequences, anachronistic rock music (including, of all songs, "Nights in White Satin"), and some truly adventurous editing; while Bonello's goals are less narrative than sensual, the result is still very compelling--and occasionally devastating--as drama, thanks in part to the uniformly-excellent ensemble cast and to Bonello's pronounced sympathy for the characters.

If someone were to attempt a movie adaptation of Berlin Childhood, it might look something like House of Pleasures... The movie takes place just before and after the turn of the 20th century; it emphasizes setting over character and plot; and it casts a mood that's both eerie and entrancing... Time and space may be rigidly defined; the storytelling is not. Bonello organizes the movie as a series of impressions, drifting from character to character without making any one the central figure.

An epilogue suggests that all prostitution is a deadly form of bondage, and L'Apollonide is a comparatively more comfortable form of it.

There is enough detail about money, cosmetics, hygiene, sexually transmitted diseases, theatrical deportment and authentic camaraderie to qualify the film as a kind of documentary. But a final coda offering a glimpse of whores in present-day Paris, waiting in the streets for passing motorists to pick them up, shows that plus ça change, plus c'est le même commerce.

There is a wonderful painterly quality to House of Tolerance with obvious influences from the romantics... House of Tolerance captures the spirit of a shifting Paris in an intimate portrayal of captivating characters – Bonello’s best film to date.

Here to prove that misogyny never quite goes out of style in the cinema, French director Bertrand Bonello presents this wearisome, questionable spectacle... The final shots exemplify the heavy-handedness and lack of real insight in this weirdly nasty film.