In the Flesh: House of Tolerance

It’s pretty revealing that English-speaking countries chose to market Bertrand Bonello’s 2011 drama about the workers of a Parisian brothel at the turn of the 19th century under the alternate title House of Pleasures. This is not a titillating film about the secret lives of sex workers. It’s not a leering look at young, nubile bodies contorting for the pleasure of their clients. The term “house of tolerance” is a half-joking industry term these women use to refer to their own labor, to the endurance required to cater to tastes banal, degrading, violent, exhausting, and otherwise complex. Fittingly, it focuses almost entirely on the workers themselves, with their johns depicted only in passing and never outside the milieu of sex work. Bernadello makes exquisite use of split screen shots to immerse his viewers in the world of the brothel, in the daily lives and routines of the women staffing it. We watch them dress and undress, bicker over antiseptic soap, cook, clean, fuck, perform. We see how they connect to one another, the space they carve out for themselves in an industry characterized by managerial exploitation and demands of constant and unfettered availability.

Shot on film and painstakingly color graded and lit, House of Tolerance brings to life the end of Europe’s elegant brothels and the beginning of a long, grueling era of systematized punishment of women engaging in sex work. There is, however, no romanticization of what might be called a golden age. In a stunning opening sequence a woman is mutilated by a client, her face carved into a perpetual smile. The brothel madam, Marie-France (Noémie Lvovsky), steals from her workers, who are forced to hide their tips and client gifts in order to make anything at all for themselves. Clotilde (Céline Sallette) contracts syphilis. That brutal closing image of modern street workers getting into and out of clients’ cars serves more to illustrate how much a small thing like a room to work in, or colleagues with whom to commiserate, can mean than it does to glorify the past. Even people with nearly nothing can lose everything, and the devastation of it is all the more extreme.

The film’s central thematic image springs from Madeleine’s (Alice Barnole) dream about crying her client’s ejaculate, thick white tears running down her cheeks. It’s a striking picture, a manifestation of the replacement of the brothel worker’s emotions with the bodily fluids of her clientele, and just as Madeleine’s face is reshaped by the brutality of her sadistic, nameless john (Laurent Lacotte), so is her real expression of grief at the loss of her former life remade in a final surrealist moment as cum begins to leak from her tear ducts. There’s something purgative about it, too. Only after her attacker is mauled and quite probably killed by the “tame” panther Ninon, agitated by a Bastille Day fireworks display, does the substance begin to leave her body. She is finally able to free herself from the psychic stain of his pleasure at her disfigurement.