House of Pleasures · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Electricity arrives at the Apollonide like weather. For most of the film the house is lit by oil, gas and candle, and every face is the colour of honey held against a warm dark. Then there is a harder light in the room. Flatter. It doesn't flatter anyone. Bonello stages this the way other directors stage the coming of sound: a technology arrives and makes a whole way of being looked at obsolete. The women's faces were built for a light that is being switched off.

Deleuze has a name for what a room like this does to time. He calls it the crystal-image: a point where a thing and its reflection swap places so fast you can't say which one you're watching. The actual and the virtual, running the same circuit. In most films you need a mirror to get there. In a brothel you don't. Bonello asks his ensemble for a doubled register, the performed vivacity the women give clients and the flat exhaustion they give each other, then builds every scene so both stay legible at once. The woman on the divan is the woman in the kitchen. Neither one is the mask.

Deleuze sorts crystals by what is happening inside them, and the state he took from Visconti is the crystal in decomposition: an ordered, ceremonial, quasi-aristocratic world rotting from within while its manners hold. That is the Apollonide's exact condition, and naming it gets you further than elegiac period film does. The house is on a deadline. The landlord is raising the rent, the trade is migrating to the streets and the cafés, the ledger in Marie-France's office keeps filling. None of the ritual changes. Women are still arranged on divans in tableaux for arriving clients, still dispersing, still re-forming. The ceremony goes on being perfect while the world it belongs to dies, and the perfection is a symptom rather than a consolation. The 2012 Césars nominated the film almost entirely for its surfaces: cinematography, costume, design, sound. Right about where the film lives. Wrong about what the surfaces are doing.

Here is what makes the lens more than a label. Deleuze's other two crystals are named after Ophüls and Renoir, and both men are in this film's blood. Ophüls has the perfect crystal, the sealed round with no outside, and the Maison Tellier episode of Le Plaisir hands Bonello his brothel-as-household-economy plus something sharper: Ophüls's habit of keeping the camera outside windows and doorways, so you watch from where a paying visitor would stand. Renoir has the cracked crystal, the flaw in the closed world through which something escapes into life. Bonello's single reel of exteriors, the excursion to the countryside, is shot in Renoir's own idiom out of A Day in the Country — dappled riverside light, the camera loose in the grass, faces overexposed by real sun. It is the only air in the film. Then they go back. The crack here is quoted, used, and closed, and having seen these women in daylight you know precisely what the house costs them.

The other inheritance is Hou Hsiao-hsien's Flowers of Shanghai, the governing template: a brothel filmed entirely in interiors with no exterior shot at all, oil lamps and amber falloff, slow takes circling the room. Josée Deshaies drifts laterally, enters after an event has begun, leaves before it resolves, and holds depth so shallow that the house registers as atmosphere rather than architecture. What fills those takes is what Deleuze called dead time: stretches where nothing advances, the everyday simply held. Waiting is the most repeated action in this film. A face in close-up, at length, doing nothing. Bazin argued that the long take preserved the ambiguity of the real, the world left intact for us to scan. Bonello's duration does close to the opposite. It doesn't open the room. It seals it, and makes you feel the hours the women are being billed for.

When a body carries that much time, posture starts doing the work dialogue does elsewhere. Deleuze borrowed a word from Brecht for it, the gest: an attitude that exposes a social relation instead of expressing a private feeling. Madeleine is the extreme case. A client binds her and cuts her mouth into a permanent smile, and the house, rather than losing her, re-markets the wound as an attraction. Alice Barnole has to act through a face that has been converted into signage. That is a social relation you can see. It also answers an old charge, Laura Mulvey's, that the camera turns women into spectacle. Bonello doesn't look away from the erotic image. He keeps interrupting it with the sight of work: corsets unlaced, makeup removed, a nightgown in a plain room, the doctor's inspection. The fantasy is staged, and we are watching the staging.

The film's strangest passage is a problem in time. Madeleine's dream of the client who will disfigure her arrives braided with the event itself, so premonition and cause can't be pulled apart. This isn't a flashback; a flashback is a dated past, filed tidily behind the present. Deleuze's term for what Bonello does is peaks of present: two contradictory presents held at once, both true, before and after collapsed into a single becoming. Buñuel licensed the technique in Belle de Jour by cutting between brothel room and fantasy with no marker whatsoever, no dissolve, no music cue, identical light. Bonello takes that refusal of a marker and aims it at time instead of at reality.

Underneath everything is arithmetic. From Mizoguchi's Street of Shame the film takes the institutional ledger: individual debts, advances, family remittances, the madam's accounting given the same weight as the erotic scenes. The women are charged for their rooms, their gowns, their meals, their medical inspections. They arrive owing and they stay owing. Marie-France, played by the filmmaker Noémie Lvovsky, is neither monster nor rescuer, just a middle manager with a landlord problem. That ledger is what Deleuze would call the film's symbol, the object into which its whole organizing relation condenses. The American title, House of Pleasures, is the precise thing the ledger disproves.

Twice Bonello breaks the period open on purpose. Late in the film the frame divides into panels and several women's routines run simultaneously, and the house stops being a place and becomes a chart: interchangeable labour, readable at a glance. The image gives up its self-evidence and asks to be deciphered, which is Deleuze's lectosign. The second break is the last shot, a cut that leaps roughly a century into contemporary Paris, women waiting for cars on a modern street, traffic noise crashing into two hours of sealed interior sound. Nothing connects the two images, and that is the point. Deleuze called this the irrational cut, one that joins across a gap rather than through continuity, so that the meaning is the gap. The coda is a rhyme, not an epilogue, and it retroactively converts everything before it from period reconstruction into ongoing condition. The soundtrack works the same way. The Moody Blues under a slow dance, Lee Moses's grinding soul dropped into 1899 like a foreign object. Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette got to the anachronistic needle-drop first, but hers confer youth and buoyancy. Bonello's confer dislocation, and insist that the feeling in the room is not historical and will not stay in 1900.

So what did it do. It took the most over-filmed room in European cinema and refused it as spectacle without refusing its beauty, which is the harder trick. Barry Lyndon proved you could expose a period interior on candle and lamplight and compose it as painting; Deshaies runs that grammar on faster stock at a shallower plane and points it at wage labour. The film's real argument is that a closed world is not a metaphor for anything. It is an economy with a door, and the door has a price. Bonello's own late run starts in this house, and Saint Laurent, Nocturama and The Beast all inherit the method: a sealed system, scored against its own period so the period can't seal over.

The one thing the film won't resolve is its own position. Ophüls put the camera outside the window and made you a visitor; Bonello takes that seat and never gets up from it. The amber is gorgeous, and it is the light the house was selling. Watch it a second time for the waiting rather than for the sex, and see whether you can decide if the film has escaped the seduction it is anatomising — or whether refusing to decide is the most honest thing in it.