The New Cult Canon: ‘House of Tolerance’

“If I ever get out of here, I’ll never make love again.” — Adèle Haenel, House of Tolerance

The Moody Blues song “Nights in White Satin” arrives at the end of its 1967 prog-rock record Days of Future Passed, a concept album that sequenced like a day-in-the-life, which accounts for the hazy, dreamy, twilight quality of a ballad that’s nonetheless suffused with emotion. Inspired by a gift of satin bedsheets from his girlfriend, Justin Hayward wrote the song when he was only 19, and its title evokes intimacy, underlined by a chorus of variations on “I love you.” Though the single didn’t catch fire until 1972, in part because the album version was too long, the track would become an unusually haunting staple to Easy Listening radio playlists, a downer ballad among more optimistic ones. 

Much like that Moody Blues album, Bertrand Bonello’s House of Tolerance—released in the States as House of Pleasures and originally titled L’Apollonide: Souvenirs de la maison close (“L’Apollonide: Memories of a Brothel”)—slots “Nights in White Satin” towards the dusk of its own concept cinema, which wouldn’t necessarily be unusual were it not for the fact that Bonello’s film takes place in a turn-of-the-century French brothel. I’m a sucker for anachronistic pop music cues if they suit the tone and spirit of the film, like the Tears For Fears songs that bracket Josh Safdies’ new Marty Supreme. Yet there’s something particularly exciting and meaningful about this Moody Blues song being placed in this context, because it not only connects with the film’s touching, mournful conclusion, but it brings House of Tolerance into the here and now. The oldest profession, Bonello suggests, is also an eternal one. It doesn’t exist on a set timetable. 

Such audacity is commonplace for Bonello, who’s directed at least two other films that could have been in consideration for this column: 2016’s Nocturama, a massively controversial thriller that romanticizes a multi-ethnic group of Parisian radicals who plant bombs around the city and hole up at a chic department store, and 2023’s The Beast, which tells a triptych of stories across various periods (1910, 2014 and 2044) that are loosely inspired by the Henry James novella The Beast in the Jungle. Though Bonello had gotten some critical attention for his first few features—not all of it kind, though he’d cast Jean-Pierre Léaud in his debut (2001’s The Pornographer) and Mathieu Amalric, Asia Argento, Léa Seydoux, and Michel Piccoli in his third film (2008’s On War)—House of Tolerance got booed at Cannes in 2011, which in this case (and many others) is often a more reliable mark of quality than the films that gets standing ovations. Such is the trajectory of many cult movies: They leave audiences initially flummoxed until a handful of passionate advocates turn their reputations around. 

Sequences like the “Nights in White Satin” slow-dance are the sort of movie moments that set a film like House of Tolerance apart, but even before Bonello gets to that emotional crescendo, he’s already created a world so thoroughly imagined that you can almost smell the mix of stale champagne and antiseptic cream that drifts through the brothel like a hangover at the end of an evening. With its tastefully appointed parlor rooms and boudoirs, L’Apollonide services an elite class of Parisian gentlemen, which functions as a kind of implicit threat to the women who work there, who fear getting jettisoned to the vermin-filled whorehouses of Marseilles. The sex workers here are dressed in beautiful lingerie with subtle little ties and garters, and there’s a level of intimacy and companionship that’s factored into the elevated rates. This is not the place for cheap, desultory rub-and-tug jobs.