House of Tolerance

Bertrand Bonello's HOUSE OF TOLERANCE is a great film. Emerging languorously among booze, opium, lavish dresses, and naked bodies, it stops at nothing, knowing no bounds to what it wants to express. Such a theme is practically absent from modern cinema, but Bonello's film makes you experience every aspect of it in a hard hitting way. The film begins before the turn of the century, 1899, and ends after it, in 1900. Most of the film takes place in a Paris brothel, upscale and attracting the same gents every night. One girl, however, is tied up one night, and cut from the inside of her mouth on either side. At first we just hear her screaming, and then we see her bleeding and crying and thrashing about. We next learn of life at L'Apollonide, through the arrival of a new prostitute whose just a teenager. But unlike any of the pathetic and offensive Hollywood takes on whoredom, HOUSE OF TOLERANCE emerges us into every aspect of these women's lives. They look after each other like sisters, sharing a specific and horrid existence in the closed-in house of perpetually increasing debts. As one woman is brilliantly photographed, she tells the newcomer of the gels she has to apply to her lips, vagina, and asshole. "It stings at first, but that's normal," she says with boredom. The madam watches her ladies through a one-way mirror, yet the girl from earlier, the scars in her cheeks red as lipstick, still walks about the house like a ghoul. As a decline becomes clear, Bonello's film crescendo's like an opera, pounding music and breaking up shots into four segments of real-time, and then cutting the music off abruptly shifting its focus only to return to pounding opera music. The end of the film only brings everything together under a different lens, but in its similar imagery, reminds us of what came earlier. It's a brilliant film.

★★★★★ out of Five