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December 9, 2011

House Of Pleasures

The above split-screen is probably my favorite frame from Bertrand Bonello's House Of Pleasures, formerly and more appropriately titled House Of Tolerance. It's an easy one to pick, although hard to call the best when a film is as overflowing with lush and stately chiaroscuros as this one. Misguided by critical reception from Cannes, I sat down expecting a predictably romantic, predictably male portrait of prostitution. What I received instead, right out the gate, was one the most invigorating uses of time I've seen in a film in quite some time. The sequence in which the Jewish whore named Madeline goes to her fateful rendezvous darts in and out of a dream, forward and back through time, skipping freely but never lightly as it all circles back towards a single inevitable outcome, just as the film on the whole does, as per its actual subject, the advent of history.

If only because of the proximity of their premieres and subsequent releases, it's difficult not to compare the Bonello's film to Julia Leigh's Sleeping Beauty, another elegant film about, at least on a superficial level, the oldest profession. I prefer this one, not because I sympathize with my own sex but simply because Bonello's intentions have a greater degree of exactitude, and he executes them likewise. There's plenty of room for symbolism, but not much for ambiguity, and I've reached a point when I see a woman weeping tears made up of a particular bodily fluid, I'm happy to know what it really is I'm looking at.

The film was much talked about at Cannes because of that image, and also because of its use of anachronistic diagetic music. In one key scene, the women slow dance to the Moody Blues' Nights In White Satin. This was once to me one of the greatest of all songs. I was seventeen or eighteen, and its grandiosity rocked my world. It wasn't the first Moody Blues song to do so; one night, I was driving home from work and heard the last half of Question on the radio and pulled into a parking lot to jot down the lyrics before they escape me. "It's not the way that you say it when you say the things you do" - this was a great song! Google was a year or two away then, and I couldn't look up a snippet of lyrics the way I would now; I didn't even find out that the song was by the Moody Blues for quite some time. Eventually I did, and eventually I bought some of their records, and eventually I became less enamored with their bombast, and then one day came to the conclusion that this amazing band was in truth quite silly. I was talking about this to a friend earlier in the summer - how music that can mean so much to you at some point can suddenly become terrible.

So in addition to its other wonderful qualities, Bertrand Bonello's House Of Pleasures managed to make the Moody Blues un-terrible to me once more. Which, when you see the film, which you should, you'll understand to be an incredibly appropriate and telling propensity.

Posted by David Lowery at December 9, 2011 1:23 AM