When Bertrand Bonello released L'Apollonide (Souvenirs de la maison close) in 2011, he was already one of the most renowned filmmakers in French cinema. Films such as Le pornographe (2001), Tiresia (2003) and De la guerre (2008) have elevated him to the national pantheon of great auteurs, alongside contemporaries such as Claire Denis, Bruno Dumont and Arnaud Desplechin. With his fifth feature film, a story about a luxury brothel in fin-de-siècle Paris, with a phenomenal cast of actresses including Alice Barnole, Hafsia Herzi, Jasmine Trinca, Adèle Haenel and Céline Sallette, Bonello achieved his first great cult movie.
Taking up a good part of his obsessions (the nooks and crannies of sex and desire, patriarchal violence, the thin border between reverie and reality, reflection on ‘the great theatre of the world’), but placing them in a new and fertile narrative terrain, Bonello weaves a fascinating tapestry around the lives of a dozen prostitutes, their longings, fears and, above all, their tragic existences. A choral work, overflowing with affection (and lust) for its characters, L'Apollonide is also a strangely faithful portrait of the end of an era, even if Bonello has no problem introducing abundant anachronisms (and a flash-forward that makes the film's discourse timeless), which ultimately certify his voracious voracity for reference as a creator. Sequences such as the collective excursion to the countryside (one of the few moments in which the story leaves the decadent house of tolerance of the title), the heartbreaking dance of the protagonists to the sound of The Moody Blues or the overwhelming final resolution during the New Year's Eve of 1900, in which references to Auguste Renoir and classic film noir pulsate, are just some of the many pearls of this film, whose passionate images are already part, in their own right, of the memory of the world's cinephilia. GABRIEL DOMÉNECH GONZÁLEZ