Review of the film “House of Pleasure” by Anissa Bonnfon

At the box office – Anissa Bonnfon’s film La Maison, based on the autobiographical book by Emma Becker, a writer who worked of her own free will in a Berlin brothel for two and a half years. Mikhail Trofimenkov it seemed that the French auteur cinema in this film “hit the bottom.” And it would be nice if we were talking about the day of obscenity, but no, this is the bottom of banality and nonsense.

What and how talentedly Emma (Ana Girardot) wrote before she was pushed by the original idea to plunge deeply into the world of prostitution – of course, solely for the sake of the heartbreaking truth of her next opus – the viewer is not given to know. As well as it is not given to understand why she needs it. Yes, in the first episode, Emma, ​​drunk, tries to drag her married lover into a brothel. Sometimes it’s a matter of life. Which of the several partners who have become fed up with each other has not experimented in the “gray zone” of sex, let them be the first to throw a stone at it. But still, between the one-time kurtosis and the “deep immersion” that did not take place – the lover chickened out – there is a huge distance.

Emma overcomes this distance at the expense of one-two-three. She put on stockings and a short skirt, came to an audience with a bandersha with scarlet eyelids, lied that she had the necessary experience, and forward. They accept her into the ranks of sex workers only because she is French. Say, it’s so – oh-oh-oh – piquant. And the French accent is so exciting customers. What, in the Berlin brothels, not a single French woman in their entire long history was found? Moreover, in France, prostitution is prohibited, and in Germany it is allowed. In general, all these groans in the genre of “oh, she’s French” evoke stupid anecdotes: “oh, Jacques, come to us, the three of us will have more fun.”

When the Bandera invites Emma to choose a “stage name”, she is called Justine. Theoretically, the movie can be interrupted at this phrase. What could be more banal than an appeal to the heroine of the Marquis de Sade? Moreover, the pseudonym is in no way connected with the heroine’s commitment to sadomasochistic practices. For all her alleged “perversion” about female domination of men, the use of dildos and whips, she learns only towards the end of the film. And the audience, along with Emma, ​​will have to listen to the most boring lecture of a dominatrix specialist that all men only dream of being fucked. At the same time, the lecturer embodies an unconditionally positive beginning. I wonder if an equally positive male character could declare publicly from the screen that “all women only dream.”

However, Emma also works in the most boring brothel in the world – German, organized in a sense as not so much a Prussian barracks, but a Prussian ladies’ boarding school. It is strictly forbidden to smoke in it. Take psychostimulant substances – even more so. One antipathetic client smokes brazenly in bed, and even persuades Emma to use cocaine: he will be immediately put out on the street, despite screams about his close acquaintance with the owner of the brothel.

However, he will have time to sell Emma one “track”. After that, she will run in a panic along the Berlin streets and call her lover: oh, they made me sniff, I’m so scared. I just want to pat her on the head and say: I dreamed of a “deep dive”, so I would go to a factory or a hospital to work, like the great reporters of the 1970s went, no one will teach you bad things there.

In general, Emma will move from one brothel to another, called “The House” and run not by a man, but by a woman. Say, the new mistress herself worked on the panel, so for her girls she is a mother. The “girls”, waiting for clients, relax for hours and chatter about their everyday problems, and Emma diligently and openly writes down the whole texture in notebooks. To a gentle lover who happened by chance, she will tell what an inexhaustible storehouse of life’s truth is contained in this chatter. The viewer is doomed to confusion. It is hardly possible to consider as a vital truth an exchange of opinions about what kind of oil is better to rub the skin, or that it is better to lie on the couch and chew pizza while waiting for a client than to work like a cattle scurrying outside the walls of a brothel.

This “truth” is as fascinating as the most boring montage of Emma’s coitus with antipathetic men or the vulgar rapid in the scene of her, as it were, lyrical copulation with her lover. But Emma’s monologue about the “piercing truth of work” in a brothel and the “search for femininity” in a genuine “women’s nest” that crowns the film cannot be called boring. It is stunningly amazing, like a blind hymn to prostitution. Has the writer Emma ever heard of the fact that brothels are part of the most brutal sex industry, which includes not only such as “House”, “women’s nests”, but also plantations of sex slaves? Did you have any idea that – with all the legalization of prostitution in Germany three times – crime inevitably slumbers around the corner of any such institution? In general, only one moral can be extracted from the film: do not go, guys, to the left, there is nothing good there.