L'Apollonide: Os Amores da Casa de Tolerância

This movie is a graphically shocking film about prostitution in France in a mansion of tolerance. It's French ("L'Apollonide") with English sub-titles.

Having researched heavily on this subject for one of my own works, I found it to be an eye-opening film. It's an intimate look behind the closed doors of a house of pleasure focusing on the lives of its mistress, prostitutes, and patrons.

It covers such aspects as registering as prostitutes with the Bureau of Morales, being indebted to mistresses and unable to leave their employ because of it, champagne baths with customers, selection parlors, global fashions worn by prostitutes, opulent client bedrooms, and the regulated visits by the physician examining the workers every 15 days for sign of sexually transmitted disease.

The movie contains naked women, sexually explicit scenes, and is not for the prudish or faint of heart. There are scenes of abuse of one of the girls, which may be disturbing to viewers. It delves honestly into the reality of life as a French prostitute, focusing on the sad and hopeless plight of women in brothels. The particular establishment depicted in this movie catered to aristocrats and rich businessmen, much like the Chabanais, which was one of the well-known brothels of its day.

The movie is two hours, slow moving, and not the best flick you'll ever see. Most of the sexual scenes show the men enjoying their paid visits, while the women merely go through the motions void of emotion. As troubling as the scenes were, I found myself transported into the world I researched and came away shocked at seeing the reality portrayed on screen.

Let's face it, being a prostitute wasn't glamorous. It was a profession that many poor and unskilled women chose in order to survive. It was a dangerous job where women died of syphilis, lived lives with no hope, and sold their bodies in order to eat and have housing. It portrayed a society that found pleasure in sex, living a way of life where brothels were an acceptable form of male entertainment until they were abolished in the early 20th century.

If historical films interest you on all levels, I can attest that this one hits the mark in every way. Being a French film, it adequately portrays the heyday of legalized prostitution.

This takes place in a Paris brothel just before and just after the start of the 20th century. While there is a lot of nudity and sex, the film is almost always anti-erotic, as it is so clear that the women are less than enthusiastic participants. Interestingly, I found the only moments with any erotic charge were moments between the women themselves, who support each other in what amounts to indentured servitude. Occasionally we feel the heat of human connection between them in a look, a touch, and that is far more sensual than anything they share with their clients, which is often degrading, and occasionally violent.

The film is a look at the trap poor women found themselves in, when being a prostitute was one of the only ways to make your own money, and other professions had just as many drawbacks (one woman speaks of giving up being a washer-woman because her lungs were becoming damaged from breathing ammonia all day). But the irony is, the 'expenses' of being a well kept prostitute (from room and board to perfume) are more than the women can take in, so they inevitably fall deeper and deeper into debt. Like sharecroppers, they soon 'owe their soul to the company store'.

This isn't a naturalistic film in the usual sense. It jumps around in time – something we sometimes only realize because we'll see a moment we'd watched earlier happen a second time, but in this case from a new perspective or in a new context. It's 'slow' by our usual standards, and is less about plot than about captured moments that build to something larger. It also uses anachronistic, modern music to great effect. But for all it's intentional artifice, there is a feeling of an honest sort of hyper-reality here. In the same way a poem can capture the feeling of a sunny day better than a lot of scientific explanation, so too does this poetic film capture a complex and sad world in a way that lets you feel a sense of understanding and empathy more than straight forward naturalism might.

The film-making itself is of a very high order. The cinematography and acting are both first rate, and there is a sequence near the end that combined acting, images and music to give me chills in the rare way sequences by great film-makers can sometimes do. Not every choice works, but this is a bold, challenging and emotional film. It doesn't tell you what to think, it just creates a world, invites you inside and allows you to draw your own conclusions. I suspect I will get even more from it on a second viewing.

This is one of the best films of 2012. When it hits ex rental, this is one I'm definitely buying. It's a highly erotic period piece movie, that is ultimate viewing. It's a hypnotic film of this upper class french brothel in the last months 0f 1899. Some of our beauties are being sold to other brothels, others are leaving the business, where the remaining are facing a far worse fate, when health checks come into play, nearing the film's final. The last scene is kind of a teaser, showing what brothels are like today. The acting is bloody impressive from all, it's lavish sets, and wardrobe, adds to it's tasty viewing. We even have a sixteen year old, starting, a virgin, one of her first, double minded, about going with her. He finally does, here she ends up losing it in a champagne bath, later washing all the icky ailment off. This lass's interview with the madam that has her stripping off totally, then letting her hair loose, is very hot indeed. We do too have that one dangerous customer (it's always the quiet ones) who leaves a scarring impression on one of the prostitutes, by slitting the corners of her mouth open, where she now wears a joker kind of smile, 24-7 and has now resorted to mainly working as a housemaid. Some of the client's requests, are as you can guess, out of the ordinary, one girl pretending to be a robotic doll, where a handsome young french man comes up behind her, lifts up her dress and you know. At the the start of this somewhat bizarre scene's, where he's lying down, staring across at her, if transfixed, somewhat playing the role too, is an unforgettable image. The dialogue in subtitle is smart and original. A truly hypnotic movie experience, this is one those films that comes along every so often, a rare gem, a rare treat to the naked eyes. Highly recommended, especially for lovers of foreign erotica.

This is a serious and complex film. It takes the audience out of their comfort zone. Not everyone will understand the film. The film is about women that may have no other choice but to sell their bodies, about freaks that buy their bodies, about these women's inability to pay off their so called "debt", about cruelty, about general stigma that surrounds these women. All of the women in the story's brothel are regular girls that have no one to turn to for help, but possibly each other. The reference to the pseudo "study" that one idiot sites in the film, the choice of music, the way the film ends - all help to make the audience think about the film and its story not as something from the past, but as issues that continue on and the reasons (society maybe) behind these issues.

Nicely acted and photographed, this could however easily be very depressing - not only in the unvarnished depiction of life in a Paris brothel 100 years ago but in the clear message that things aren't too different today.

Debt, disease and the possibility of shocking violence are ever-present, although conversations among the women about jobs that they have done beforehand (e.g. The "industrial injury" side of being a launderess) suggest that being a prostitute wasn't necessarily the *worst* option available.

Sobering stuff, but the camaraderie looks real and softens the tone somewhat. Recommended.