Day blurs into night for the women of L’Apollonide, a Paris brothel in Bertrand
Bonello’s House of Tolerance.

Family, sexuality and the financial crisis are just some of the subjects explored in
this year’s French Film Festival. Philippa Hawker previews the best.

SET in a brothel about 1900, writer-director Bertrand Bonello’s House of
Tolerance is one of the highlights of this year’s French Film Festival, which opens on
March 7. The film unfolds in a languorous, lush haze of inevitability, punctuated by
moments of disconcerting directness: it’s dreamlike, real, tactile and meandering, all
at once.

Bonello’s fifth feature, House of Tolerance takes place within the confines of
L’Apollonide, a brothel for middle-class men in Paris, run by a former prostitute
(Noemie Lvovsky). But the men, Bonello says, are not particularly significant in the

world of the movie, even if their demands are. This is a film about women. It drifts
from one character to another, it blurs day and night – only a single scene of escape
and respite, an outing to the country, brings the light of day or a sense of the natural
world into the film.

The brothel, Bonello says, is a closed world: ”It’s like a cinema or a brain.” It is also a
theatre, he says, that his film shows from more than one angle, representing what
happens on stage and what takes place backstage, as it were. The prostitutes have
stage names and are often expected to be performers: there is a young woman who
presents herself as a geisha and is ordered to speak fake Japanese; a girl who moves
like a life-size doll. And, on a grimmer note, there’s a woman who finds herself in
demand from a new sort of clientele after she has been brutally disfigured by one of
the customers.

On display, L’Apollonide is a sumptuous place. Backstage, it is a world of rituals and
regulations: of the repetitive daily routine, the strictures of the law and the house
rules that the madam enforces. Independence is an illusion, although many of the
girls believe they will one day be able to leave – they are in thrall to the proprietor,
indebted and unable to leave.

In 1900, a brothel similar to L’Apollonide operated legally in a highly regulated
environment. Brothels were banned in France in 1946, although selling sexual
services is not against the law.

At one point, Bonello considered making a film about the last days of the business,
directly after World War II, but decided against it – for one thing, he notes, ”I don’t
find the period very interesting visually”. But the time in which the film is set is a
moment of transition and transformation, to him: it marks an end and a beginning,
the last stage of the 19th century and the origins of modernity. It was the Paris of the
Universal Exposition, of the advent of the telephone, the Metro.

At the time, there was a sense of optimism, he says: ”People thought that the century
to come would be wise, without war, without diseases” – and that is an irony he
appreciates.

Bonello did a great deal of research for House of Tolerance: his reading included not
only academic studies but also the contents of police archives, ”which are really
fascinating”. In his script, several letters are read aloud – one comes from a 15-year-
old girl wanting to work at the brothel (she includes a self-portrait sketch); another is
a complaint that the brothel proprietor wrote about rent hikes. They are genuine,
Bonello says – he could never have invented them – and present a vivid, startling
perspective on the practicalities and attitudes of the time.

Casting, Bonello says, was the heart of the film – it took more than nine months for
him to find the dozen actors who play the women of L’Apollonide. Part of this drawn-
out process came from his focus on finding an ensemble, a group with the right
dynamic. ”The first was easy, the second had to fit with her … the 12th one was hell to

find.” And his characters grew out of this sense of identity, he says. ”Half is what I
wrote, half is what the girl brings as a person, not an actress.”

He asked his performers to do certain things to prepare for the film: to read Laure
Adler’s book Daily Life in the Bordellos of Paris, for example, and listen to specific
pieces of music that he was planning to use in the movie. But he did not want to
know about other ways in which they researched their roles – ”that is their secret
garden”. He didn’t become aware until later, for example, of a book that was an
important tool for Celine Sallette, who plays Clotilde, a woman who has spent half
her life in the brothel and started to become dependent on opium. Sallette found
inspiration in Roland Barthes’ The Lover’s Discourse, with its dense, distilled
fragments that explore a quest to characterise and recognise the nature of love.

Despite his research, Bonello doesn’t want to be a slave to period detail, to make a
fetish out of authenticity. That’s why, for example, he uses music that’s unequivocally
anachronistic but sounds right.

The Moody Blues’ Nights in White Satin, for example, has never seemed more
appropriate for a slow dance of mourning; an R&B song such as The Right to Love
You, by the Mighty Hannibal, doesn’t seem out of place as a soundtrack for the
women as they circulate in the salon among their clients.

This kind of detail, Bonello says, is not meant to be understood as a disruption to the
mood or tone. ”It’s a 2011 film, not a 1900 film. So I allow myself to use things that
are important for the emotions – not to break things up but to put them together.” It
is a film made, he says, with ”no moral judgments, no messages, but with research
and imagination”.

Adele Haenel, who plays a prostitute named Lea, had a meeting with Bonello before
she read the screenplay. ”I loved it,” she says. ”It was full of information, feelings,
perceptions.” Haenel, 22, played her first lead role at 13 but only recently committed
herself to acting full time. Talking about House of Tolerance, she is full of ideas and
analysis and eager to discuss all aspects of the film.

Haenel is interested in the film’s broader implications and was taken with the idea
that its setting can be seen as a metaphor for cinema. She recalls a scene in which Lea
is asked by a client to present herself as a kind of automaton, or living doll. ”The
scene that I did for the audition is also a kind of audition within the film,” she says.

The Age – Philippa Hawker. February 25, 2012. Dreams held captive.
Alliance Francaise French Film Festival, March 7-25: affrenchfilmfestival.org.