House of Pleasures (2011)

disgusting, overrated, pointless

Charming and brutal

The movie turns out to be a little better than the average. Starting from a romantic formula often seen in the cinema, it ends in the most predictable (and somewhat bland) way.

I didn’t really have many expectations going into the movie (good or bad), but I actually really enjoyed it. I really liked the characters and the banter between them.

This movie is boring! It's one of those movies that seems like it will get better and turn around at the very next scene, but that never happens. It just drags on with no dialogue, no character development, and really nothing worth waiting for. Everything is suggested, drama included. If ever there was a 'nothing' movie this is it. Writing ten lines to review this film is almost as much a waste of time as it was watching it. The movie has but two redeeming qualities that get a viewer to its end. One is that it looks good. Everything about this film says visually "hey this is a good movie," when in fact it isn't. The only other thing in the film worth noting is that there is a panther. That's it. Panthers are cool.

It was a long, hard slog, trying to get through this story of a French whorehouse and its staff during la belle époque. A poor sixteen-year-old applies, and is accepted into, the bordello. She's the audience proxy. The other ladies teach her the tricks of the trade. On the whole, it might have been written by a French anthropologist. The writer/director is determined to show us how this system works. I admire Levi-Strauss but I could never understand him. I think I understand this movie, though. It's just that it's so dull.It might have helped if any of the characters were at all animated but they're not. They're, how you say, blasé. It would also have helped if there were even one girl who was beautiful enough to coagulate your eyeballs. Instead, one of the most prominent of the ladies has a nose on her that suggests she should be hovering over a grassy field, wings fluttering, searching for mice.On the plus side, a good deal of attention is paid to period detail. The production crew must have studied Toulouse-Lautrec with a microscope, and it turned out pretty atmospheric. We have the rosy cheeks, the scented soap, and those endearing black chokers that girls of the period used to wear and that -- come to think of it -- Natalie Portman wore in "Léon: The Professional." Whatever happened to black chokers anyway? They were very sexy. Everything seems to be changing for the worse. The old days are gone forever.I'm joking around because, I expect, I have nothing much more to say about the film. I retired from anthropology some years ago and am fed up with tribal studies.You want to see a decent whorehouse movie? See "Pretty Baby," also directed by a Frenchman, Louis Malle, in 1978. The setting is New Orleans in 1917, but it's very French in its approach to whoredom, and New Orleans was still rather a French city with monolingual French speakers. Degas visited relatives there. The set design is equally evocative. And it has drama as well as nudity. This one has only nudity.

The titling is written in an unimaginative Arial-type font, a mood that doesn't change until two hours have passed away.If this is meant as a metaphor of a brothel, then the movie succeeded.A parade of sumptuous draperies, robes, champagne, panthers and naked bodies isn't enough to make a good movie - or at least shot as this one is. They are not able to express by themselves ideas or a captivating plot.The only positive aspect is the anachronistic use of modern music for a story set at the end of the 19th century. (Something seen in a much better movie, with some visual and spatial similarities, Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette.)

I loved this film, I am surprised to see more than one review damning the film for a lack of plot. There is most definitely a plot it's subtle and thoughtful but the characters all have an arc and, for some, very definite resolutions. The cast are superb, even those with the smallest roles present fully rounded individuals of whom it's possible to infer their lives outside the bounded world presented to us. The relationships between the women of the house both amongst themselves and with their clients are rich and true. Although full of sex and sexuality nothing is gratuitous or titillating but real and honest. Sometimes good, sometimes dreadful, sometimes funny, sometimes a violation. This was a film that I would have been happy to watch for another two hours , I didn't want to leave these women behind.