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Title: L'Apollonide (Souvenirs de la maison close) (2011)
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| Cast overview, first billed only: | |||
| Noémie Lvovsky | ... | ||
| Hafsia Herzi | ... | ||
| Céline Sallette | ... | ||
| Jasmine Trinca | ... | ||
| Adèle Haenel | ... | ||
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Alice Barnole | ... | |
| Iliana Zabeth | ... | ||
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Pauline Jacquard |
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Anaïs Thomas |
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Maia Sandoz | ... |
(as Maïa Sandoz)
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Joanna Grudzinska |
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Esther Garrel |
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| Xavier Beauvois |
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Louis-Do de Lencquesaing |
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| Jacques Nolot |
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Life in an elegant Parisian brothel in the early twentieth century. The madam essentially owns the women: their expenses exceed earnings, they are in debt. They face problems of pregnancy, opium, age, and violent clients. One reads sociology at her peril. Occasionally, a client talks of marriage. There are also friendships and affection among the women. The madam is in a dispute with her landlord and calls on influential clients to help. There's a picnic one summer day, a wake, and an evening in masks. Have they expectations? In a coda, we watch a street scene in contemporary Paris. Written by <[email protected]>
Lacking a decent plot, this movie looks like a very expensive reportage in a pretentious fashion magazine. The "girls" working in the "maison" are all young, slim and relatively good looking, and spend their evenings dressed in velvet, lace and expensive jewelry, drinking lots of champagne and having sex with kinky and decadent rich men as an afterthought.
The "action" - or lack thereof - takes place between 1899 and 1900, when apparently men had a lot of free time, since before getting down to business they could lounge drinking champagne from p**s pots, stare at female body parts for hours and converse about nothing with the girls.
Despite what may sound like an enviably decadent and sensual environment, nobody looks like they are having any fun and the very few sex scenes are always with women in various degrees of nakedness and men fully clothed (with barely the glimpse of a penis). This makes the movie even more misogynist and boring, although it is difficult to understand to which audience it was targeted. Since it is a French movie, it was probably supposed to be "art" because the French are not interested in business.
If this is art, it is definitely of the most tedious type. Half way I started wondering how long it was still going to last, hoping for the story to pick up. But nothing happened until the film ends, with the stupidest fading to modern day Paris, and a prostitute getting out of the car of a client, as if to say that those "girls" of one hundred years ago really had it so good.....