French filmmaker Bertrand Bonello’s elegant “House of Pleasures” transports viewers to an early-20th-century Parisian brothel, where a dozen women cater to well-to-do gentlemen.
The hookers range from a fresh-faced 16-year-old to middle-aged women. One woman — grotesquely scarred by a knife-wielding customer — is confined to the kitchen and laundry room, except when her services are needed at an orgy.
The brothel is run by a widow with two young children. The prostitutes find they have little chance of leaving the cat house because they’re indebted to the madam, who advances them money for designer gowns and fancy perfume. Scenes of opium-charged pleasure are mixed with such mundane details as that of a doctor’s visit to examine the women for VD.
Despite copious full-frontal female nudity, “House of Pleasures” isn’t mere sexploitation. Rather, it’s a gorgeously filmed portrait of a bygone era, with painstaking attention to period detail. On the downside, the movie is overlong; and the use of modern music, like the Moody Blues’ “Nights in White Satin,” breaks the film’s dreamlike trance.
In French, with English subtitles. Running time: 125 minutes. Not rated (sex, nudity). At the IFC Center, Sixth Avenue and Third Street.