Synopsis
A young woman begins a new life at the Apollonide bordello, a high-class brothel in Paris at the turn of the 20th century.
2011 ‘L'Apollonide, souvenirs de la maison close’ Directed by Bertrand Bonello
A young woman begins a new life at the Apollonide bordello, a high-class brothel in Paris at the turn of the 20th century.
Noémie Lvovsky Hafsia Herzi Céline Sallette Jasmine Trinca Adèle Haenel Alice Barnole Iliana Zabeth Judith Lou Lévy Pauline Jacquard Anaïs Thomas Maïa Sandoz Joanna Grudzinska Esther Garrel Xavier Beauvois Louis-Do de Lencquesaing Jacques Nolot Laurent Lacotte Pierre Léon Jean-Baptiste Verquin Michel Peteau Marcelo Teles Guillaume Verdier Justin Taurand Damien Odoul Paul Moulin Henry Lvovsky Paolo Mattei Fred Epaud François Magal Show All…
House of Tolerance, Casa de tolerancia, Casa de placeres, 라폴로니드: 관용의 집, Souvenirs de la maison close, Haus der Sunde, L'Apollonide Recuerdos del burdel, L'Apollonide: Os Amores da Casa de Tolerância, Tolerancijos namai, Apollonide - Memórias de Um Bordel, 하우스 오브 톨러런스, 관용의 집, メゾン~ある娼館の記憶~, L'APOLLONIDEメゾン ある娼館, メゾン ある娼館の記憶, Apollonide – Memórias de um Bordel, Дом терпимости, Haus der Sünde, Bordélyház, 妓院里的回忆, Къща на удоволствията, Спогади про бордель, 巴黎妓院回憶錄, Apollonide. Zza okien domu publicznego, Οίκος Ανοχής
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i am always, always talking about this, but the horrors that men inflict upon women's bodies is relentlessly eternal.
through disease, through physical violence, through rampant fetishism, through silencing, the male clients scar the women of the Apollonide brothel both literally and figuratively. one of them is plagued by nightmares where she cannot stop crying thick white tears of cum (a scene that made me cry tears of saline). but despite it all, there is laughter and camaraderie. in private, the women are able to joyfully commiserate and poke fun at their clients as a way to offset their pain. the camera points decisively from their perspectives (shout out to cinematographer Josée Deshaies), painting a wonderfully empathetic portrait of Parisian…
"what will you do now?"
uh, so i think this is some kind of masterpiece? but if FLOWERS OF SHANGHAI taught me anything, it's that i'm a sucker for languorous period pieces about cloistered, opium-addicted prostitutes (and who could blame me?). will have to stew on how i feel about how things progress once the petals begin to wilt, but this already resonates with me as a sonorous still-life about prisons within prisons... a panopticon of the body.
"My only books are Sade's diaries and the Bible. And I haven't read the Bible."
This line summarizes perfectly the embodiment of good vs. evil that this film represents: the current hell on earth of the protagonists vs. their idealized existence outside of the brothel they unfortunately serve in.
Bleak before erotic, tragic before dramatic, claustrophobic before liberating, empathetic before sexual, psychological before sensuous, Bertrand Bonello's Cannes-celebrated approach towards a group of female prostitutes in a turn-of-the-Century French bordello is one grim examination of emotional and psychological imprisonment that women in debt have to undergo while fulfilling carnal demands and even violent perversions from the male clients that, for differing reasons, all of them questionable and deplorable, visit the place…
Trapped.
At first, you like it. The attentions, the luxuries. You don't need to worry anymore about the common problems of everyday life. Food, shelter, they are all brought to you in the highest of fashions. The days of wildness are long gone, and life has turned into a wild dream. It's a dream, isn't it? You wake up. The dream has ended, and it has left a bad taste in your mouth. Maybe it wasn't a dream. Those days when you were free, to go as you wished, to be who you wanted to, they are gone. Suddenly, you long for the freedom you have left behind, when, too naive in front of the world you trusted men to…
Tonight, just pretend I’m dead.
Being a woman is exhausting you don’t even get to have a body! It belongs to everyone who looks at you! People decide that your body looks like that because you meant for it to look like that and not because it just looks like that! People (men) contort your body (not your body) into any shape they want just because they wanted to see it in that shape for a moment and it’s just a moment for them but it’s your body’s shape forever! Your whole life! Makes me very angry if you couldn’t tell
imagining someone who thought this was gonna be really horny Nd then wound up becoming a depressed marxist
I've never had sex for money but I have always been a whore. I remain a whore to this day. I will die a whore. The only jobs I could ever see myself doing weren't really jobs although they are each quite labor-intensive in their own right: writer, artist, witch, seeress, vampiress, courtesan. Although I was eventually able to know this as folly I believed that because I could not look upon myself with a desiring gaze that no one else would be able to either. I knew that I could still do sex work even as I was but it felt wrong. I knew it would not be fulfilling in the way I needed it to be also I…
76/100
[TIFF '11 drive-by]
Really ashamed now that I allowed the chorus of jeers at Cannes to sway me, because this is blatantly terrific. Bonello somehow manages to indulge in gorgeous, languid nostalgia without romanticizing a whit, reveling in beauty and female camaraderie—in some ways this is a distaff war movie, set in the trenches—while simultaneously acknowledging pain, loss, even outright horror. Runs a tad long, perhaps, but at the same time I'm not sure there's a moment I wouldn't be sorry to lose. Certainly not the much-mocked coda, which knocked me on my ass all over again.
House of Tolerance. (Souvenirs de la maison close). 2011. Directed by Bertrand Bonello.
Bertrand Bonello gives us a realistic image of what a French brothel was like at the turn of the century (18th to 19th). The director extends his greatest compassion to the employees who are at best prisoners of the Apollonide, the opulent Belle Epoque Parisian bordello of House of Tolerance (2011). Featuring some of France's greatest actresses (Adèle Haenel, Céline Sallette, Noemie Lvovsky, Hafsia Herzi, Jasmine Trinca, Alice Barnonle, and Esther Garrel).
As new employees arrive to see if they can earn a living, the madam states to new applicants “Freedom is outside. Not in here.” as the new applicants are looking for money and freedom. The film…