On Demand Weekly

On Demand Weekly provides new movie reviews of hot movies on demand from the POV of watching from the comfort of your home. Today’s review: HOUSE OF PLEASURS (IFC Films).

HOUSE OF PLEASURES
When times get tough, liberal acceptance and tolerance take the first hit…
By Cynthia Kane

What is it that attracts us to the 19th century romanticist notion that whorehouses were more than just that… that they were houses of pleasure, houses of love, places where notorious acts of the flesh could, if only, turn into quixotic love?

In this gorgeously and sensuously photographed film directed by Bertrand Bonello, there’s honesty and brutality amidst the beauty of the women who live and work here… in this so-called “house of pleasure”. Yet there is no real pleasure for these women who are little more than slaves, no house of romantic notions except for the men who come incessantly to satisfy their needs from these young – and some barely pubescent - women. In the end it’s only a place that takes and takes and takes from these young prostitutes, from the men who come to be serviced and the madam who attempts to make her fortune.

HOUSE OF PLEASURES is a complex, a dreamlike journey descending into hell. A metaphor one thinks of the romantic dream of the 19th century turning into the genocidal, bloodthirsty and dehumanizing century of the 20th. It’s as if we’re sucked into a sumptuous, deliriously gorgeous nightmare from which we’ll only awaken 2 hours+ later, when the film thrusts us back into the Parisian streets of the 21st century. Thrust into cold contemporary reality only to be haunted by the previous images we’ve absorbed...

I wonder if this is closer to the film

Stanley Kubrick wanted to make

when he directed EYES WIDE SHUT?

Released by IFC FILMS in the U.S. as HOUSE OF PLEASURES (also known as HOUSE OF TOLERANCE in the UK and L’APOLLONIDE: SOUVENIRS DE LA MAISON CLOSE, its title in competition at Cannes), this is a film that will stay with you long after like a hallucinatory trip that we at once long to never escape and wish to God we’d never took. This is a director with much to say, but never directly. He’s an illusory poet leaving us to figure it out. He seems to want us to long for and repulse from all of it at once.