L’Apollonide (Souvenirs de la maison close) (2011) - film review

In a Parisian brothel at the start of the 20th century there lives a young prostitute whose face is disfigured by a scar that takes the form of a tragic smile.  Around her, other, more fortunate, girls make the most of the lot that they have been given - a life marked by joy, pain, fear and rivalry.  Outside the walls of the brothel, no one knows what goes on within.  How aptly it is named by the French une maison close...

In 1866, the French painter Gustave Courbet created his most famous work, L’Origine du monde.  An unashamedly realist depiction of a woman’s most intimate parts, the painting was intended as a direct assault on the bourgeois double standards of Second Empire France and was to be one of the most provocative paintings of the century.  Bertrand Bonello’s latest film, so obviously inspired by Courbet’s work, has a similar function - to attack contemporary attitudes towards prostitution and the exploitative depiction of sex in art - and has met (predictably) with a similarly hostile reaction in some quarters.  L’Apollonide (Souvenirs de la maison close) may resemble a quaint period piece set within the narrow confines of a circa 1900 brothel but it is a film with a very modern thrust, and anyone who is offended by it should examine his or her conscience very closely.

Bonello is no stranger to controversy.  One of France’s most idiosyncratic auteur filmmakers, with just four features under his belt, he has already acquired a reputation as a maverick who delights in venturing into untrodden territory, making few concessions to the arid tastes of the more reactionary critics as he does so.  His first notable film, Le Pornographe (2001), was a wry but incisive commentary on the misappropriation of pornography in cinema; his subsequent film Tiresia (2003) is one of French cinema’s bleakest and most shocking studies in sexuality.  These two films, along with L’Apollonide, form a remarkable trilogy that explores, with startling insight and a disquieting poetry, the most profound mystery of human experience.  It is easy to be put off by the almost theatrical stylisation of Bonello’s mise-en-scène and his reluctance to pay anything other than lip service to the unwritten rules of film narrative, but for those who are more receptive to cinematic innovation and can forgive the occasional slip into pretentious silliness, his films can provide a rich and revelatory cinema experience.    

The heavily laden artistry of L’Apollonide and its lack of all but the flimsiest of plots both present a challenge for the spectator but, if you can bring yourself to take off the aesthetic handbrake and just go with it, the film will soon have you within its thrall.  There is a poetry to L’Apollonide that is both alluring and chilling, as inviting as that most primitive of human desires, and every bit as disturbing.  If anything, the film’s lack of structure lends more power to its underlying messages, which range from the general - women’s eternal quest for freedom and independence in an unjustly male-dominated world - to the specific - the necessity for regulation (hence legalisation) of today’s prostitution industry.  The film’s pro-feminist stance is apparent both in its representation of the prostitute as a free spirit with an independent mind and in the graphic portrayal of abuse and exploitation that late 19th century prostitutes suffered at the hands of their greedy employers and their less considerate male clients.  Whilst acknowledging that prostitution can never be effectively outlawed, the film provides a powerful case for the legalisation of the world’s oldest profession.

L’Apollonide is Bonello’s most ambitious and most highly stylised film to date.  It is packed full of artistic and literary references which will probably go straight over the heads of most people who see it, not that this matters.  The brothel of the film’s title takes its name from Apollonie Sabatier, a well-known 19th century courtesan who inspired some of the greatest French writers and painters of the age - Alexandre Dumas, Gustave Flaubert, Charles Baudelaire, Alfred de Musset and Gustave Coubert (to name just five).   She was the model for Coubert’s L’Origine du monde and the inspiration for several poems in Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal.  Just as Coubert’s most famous work is evoked by the film’s flagrant eroticism, so does Baudelaire’s timeless verse linger in the air of every scene, like a perfume of the most exquisitely bittersweet fragrance.

Among the most apparent sources of inspiration for the film are the brazenly erotic French paintings of the latter half of the 19th century, by (among others) Ingres, Manet and Courbet.  Where L’Apollonide is perhaps most effective is in transposing the strikingly sensual images of these familiar works of art into the medium of film, and having a similar effect on both the eye and the soul of the spectator.  Visually, the film is stunning, and as you succumb to the feast of luxuriant images (which combine the sensual with the slightly surreal), you almost feel that you are coursing through a warm sea of velvet.  Yet whilst the film is beautifully crafted, it does have a cruel underbelly which prevents it from being an entirely comfortable viewing experience.  The female protagonists (all played to perfection by a cast of very talented actresses) have only a semblance of freedom; their apparent gaiety has a hollow ring to it.  The confined setting in which they live, luxurious though it may be, is no more than a prison in which they must readily submit to the perverse whims of their clients (making love in a bath of champagne being the best they can hope for) or else face abandonment and starvation outside its walls.  As has become his trademark, Bonello conjures up an imaginary world of idyllic beauty only to disfigure it with some moments of abject horror, as if to remind us that cruel thorns are always to be found just beneath the sweetest, most succulent of roses.

© James Travers 2012

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