Trivia:
The casting says "Clotilde" but her name is misspelled (as "Clothilde", rather a common error in France) in the movie when we see the lines of name/debt written by the matron.
User Review
So-so picture of life in a Paris brothel c. 1900
Rating:
"House of Tolerance" opens with a scene that typifies the film. A
gentlemanly client of L'Appollonide, the fictional Paris brothel of the
1890s where the film is set, declines sex with the exotic and likable
Madeleine, but requests she instead describe one of her dreams. After
she recounts a fantasy of sex with a masked man that ends with her
weeping tears of semen, he politely asks permission to tie her to the
bed. One she's helpless, he slashes both her cheeks with a
knife,leaving her with a permanently disfiguring grin.
In a real-life Paris bordello like Le Chabanais, the establishment that
inspired L'Appollonide, Madeleine would have been turned out. Instead,
the other prostitutes and its kindly madame, hearts of gold all, rally
to protect her. She becomes the house's cook, minds the children, and
even, as "The Woman who Laughs", continues to attract jaded aesthetes
excited by deformity. In one of the film's more Sadeian scenes, she
stars at an orgy involving aging aristocrats, a staff of female
servants, all nude, and a sullen black-gowned dwarf.
We see one of the obligatory fortnightly health checks required by the
police, and the system of paying the women; clients buy tokens, which
the women cash in at the end of the night. Such realism clashes with a
Visconti-esque sumptuousness in costumes and decor. The house itself is
palatial compared to Le Chabanais, or any real brothel, and the women
more attractive than the habitués of even the most elegant
establishment.
The film often feels like an anthology, shuffling together episodes and
individuals associated with the brothel culture, and not bothering too
much about anachronisms. An idyllic country picnic and skinny-dip for
the girls evokes the most humanizing of whorehouse stories,
Maupassant's "Le Maison Tellier". A client, called only Gustave and
content to spend his time in the brothel staring raptly at vaginas,
suggests Gustave Courbet, who painted "The Origin of the World", a
meticulous but faceless depiction of female pudenda. Courbet,
however,died in 1877, well before the period of the film.
Bonello is closer to his time period when he shows a girl being bathed
in champagne. The then-Prince of Wales, Victoria's son and later Edward
VII, liked to sit around such a bath at Le Chabanais and share the wine
with friends. Wine, water and secretions mix promiscuously in the film.
In an early scene, whores and clients share champagne from a gilded
chamber pot of what should be Sevres porcelain but resembles anodized
aluminum. Meanwhile, the girls play a table game using the squirt bulbs
normally employed to flush their vaginas. Repeatedly we see women
rinsing their mouths after oral sex and washing the sticky residue of
wine from their bodies. One woman observes bitterly, "this place stinks
of champagne and sperm."
Bonello is at pains to insist on the moral and emotional superiority of
the prostitutes over their sentimental, self-absorbed clients –
something even the men concede. As one ruefully confesses, "men have
secrets, but no mystery." Even Gustave, the most compassionate of the
regulars, sees the women as objects. The complaisant Pauline dresses up
for him, first in a Japanese kimono, then as a blank-eyed, jerkily
moving doll. In a scene reminiscent of Donald Sutherland coupling with
a clockwork woman in "Fellini Casanova", her impersonation of a machine
excites Gustave in a way flesh and blood never did. As he penetrates
her from behind, she stares expressionless at us, the audience, as if
to ask, "How like you me now, my masters?"
Returning repeatedly to the mutilation of Madeleine, adding more
graphic detail each time, Bonello makes us complicit in her pain. Her
endurance and acceptance, like that of all the prostitutes, is
transcendental, and appears a kind of martyrdom – an offering to the
Apollo for which the house is named. The girl dead of syphilis, the
opium addict, and, finally, all the women dumped on the streets when
the brothel closes down, have suffered and died for our sins. The last
shot of the film drives home the point. Beside a modern highway, the
same girls who staffed the L'Appollonide, now in mini-skirts and hot
pants, continue to offer sex and salvation to an indifferent male
world.
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