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2012 Opening Gala Film & Reception |
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After the screening of House of Pleasures walk the pink carpet on your way to our Homage to Film at the Atrium.
The Opening Gala Party will dazzle you with music, dancing, and delicious local-sourced food by Spinnakers Gastro Brewpub. This is an all inclusive event: film, food, and hosted bar.
House of Pleasures
L’Appolonide
Friday • February 3rd • Cap 6 Th 6 • 6:45
DireCTor: Bertrand Bonello
France • 2011 • 125 min • Digital
House of Pleasures immerses us in the long-abandoned world of the Belle Époque 1900, awash with opium, champagne, and the inevitable rush of semen. Much of the Parisian sex trade was confined to grands maisons, populated by elegant madams and a vetted clientele. They were akin to social clubs, with the gentleman participants expected to be as charming and witty as they might be in more respectable drawing rooms.
Even in such a controlled environment, dangers still lurked: disease and violence could unexpectedly erupt.
The film’s pace accentuates the languor of the place; its many personages slowly revealing their life journeys like an old-fashioned striptease. Several of the stories are grim: country girls desperate for money or dumped from failed relationships. We are in for something both sumptuously painterly and rightly sympathetic to the plight of women dependent on the mercy of the male clientele visiting their madame’s lavish but economically strict and straitened establishment.
And yet there is grace, especially in the daytime moments of sisterly camaraderie and the casual yet oddly affectionate deceits of the madam (in a stern turn from the formidable Noémie Lvovsky).
Bertrand Bonello’s highly stylized look at the final days of a fin-de-siècle brothel in Paris conjures up the languid beauty and frank sexuality of French Romantic painting. Its visual sumptuousness lands somewhere between Ingres and Renoir, but with stylistic provocations worthy of a time-travelling Baudelaire.
Screened with:
The Flying House
Winsor McCay • USA • 7.5 min
Bill Plympton’s loving restoration of the animated classic from a master of imagination.
To purchase tickets to the Gala, click here.
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