Casa de Tolerancia (L' Apollonide)

 

El pasado julio entrevisté para la revista H y vía email a Bertrand Bonello con motivo del estreno en España de ’Casa de Tolerancia. L’ Apollonide’. Corto y pego la entrevista entera en inglés. Por si hay completistas que leen La Copa de Europa. 

 

- ‘L’Apollonide’ shows a group of women prostitutes, although it’s not only a movie about prostitution, but a film that depicts women, about the feminine. What did you want to film first: women or the subject of prostitution?

Definitely women, inside an institution. I was much more interested in the life of these women inside a brothel in 1900 than in prostitution itself. The brothel is in fact the main character of the film, as a “living house”, dying slowly.

 - As in ‘Tiresia’ or in ‘Le pornographe’, sex, but specially desire, is at the core of the movie. Do you consider yourself as a filmmaker of desire?

Not really. If I had to find some common points about that, I would say that maybe all these films work on the relationship between body and mind.

- Furthermore, ‘L’Apollonide’ is a very voluptuous film and somehow its images reminded me to Gustave Courbet work (‘L’ origin du monde’ and ‘Olympia’). Did you thought ‘L’Apollonide’ in such a pictorial way?

In “L’origine du monde”, Courbet shows a woman’s sex. In L’apollonide, when the character of Louis-Do de Lencquesaing looks at Clotilde’s sex, it is in order to paint her soul and her face.

But besides this, I did’t think much about painters or paintings when I prepared the film. But as we did a lot of research about the light at that time, about costumes and attitudes, I guess we had in front of our eyes and of the camera something sometimes very close of what the 1900 painters had.

Also, the fact that there are not many shots, not many close ups, participates into the pictorial aspect of the film.

- You’ve said in previous interviews that ‘L’Apolllonide’ has been inspired by Victor Hugo novel, ‘L’Homme Qui Rit’, and also by the film that was made of the novel, ‘The Man Who Laughs’, by Paul Leni.

In fact, much more by the movie. I have seen it when I was a kid, on TV, and was very impressed by the image of the face of Conrad Veidt, that remained in me. I almost never work with dreams, but when I started to write the screenplay, I made three nights in a row a dream with this image. The fourth day, I tried to include it in the film, and created the character of “the woman who laughs”.

- I wanted to ask you about the character of Madeleine. She is a sort of broken ‘visage’ because she believed in her dreams… A lot of people asked you about the very last scene of the movie, the one that shows us Clotilde nowadays, but I’m very fascinated about the climax of ‘L’Apollonide’, when finally Madeleine dreams (erotic dreams) became true…

The first scene I wrote was when Madeleine tells her dream. The second was the incarnation of the dream. Then, all the work was “how to go from there to there”. And, is the image real? I don’t know. It is an affective image that allows Madeleine to get out of her trauma. At last. But  at the same time, I met some prostitutes when  I prepared the film, and they all found this image very real.  They could feel it.

- The cast is incredible and all the actresses (Hafsia Herzi, Adèle Haenel, Esther Garrel, Céline Sallette, Alice Barnole, etc) are splendorous. Was difficult to find them and work together as an ensemble?

It took me around 9 months to find the twelve of them. I was very obsessed with the idea of forming a group. A kind of bouquet, with different flowers. So the first one was not so difficult to find. But then, the second one had to be good AND to fit with the first one. And so on… But as I thought the cast this way, during the shoot, it was easy to work with all of them together. Though sometimes, I felt more like a football coach than like a director.

- Fragmentations, fractures, cuts, fissures and transitions play an important role in the film. First of all, there is Madeleine, whose face has been slashed by a client; secondly, the division of the screen showing different actions; thirdly, the transition between XIX and XX Century (le fin de siècle); and, finally, the sequence of the film that shows the girls in the daylight, that somehow functions as an interact. Why this insistence for fragmentation and cuts throughout ‘L’Apollonide’?

It is all matter of how you play with time. As I could not play much with space, I wanted to give space with time. But each of these fragmentations has a meaning. For example, the splitscreens reminded me of the security cameras. I always thought the film as a film of prison.

- What role has time in the movie? At the beginning of ‘L’Apollonide’, Madeleine says about the brothel: “It has changed, but changes slowly”. It seems that time does not exist inside the walls of the brothel…

I wanted the notion of time to disappear slowly as the film goes on. And the film, to slowly slip to something more and more dreamy, in which you distinguish with more and more difficulty the real from the unreal.

- And about the brothel… It also seems that the brothel has multiple functions: it could be a prison, a place for business, a nursery, a location where fantasy comes true, a home, etc. Is the brothel a sort of black box, a sort of metaphor of what cinema can be?

Yes, it is many things. That is the fascinating thing about working on any kind of institution. You can recreate a whole world inside the world.

But the brothel itself can be indeed a metaphor of cinema. I thought it this way. When you are inside a movie theatre, you have no windows, you are cut from the outside, from real word, and you are ready for fantasy, phantasm. Exactly like in the brothel. I thought my brothel exactly like a movie theatre. Like a brain.

- Maybe you can answer me a question I have about ‘Ingrid Caven. Music et voix’. The film is at 65^th Locarno program, and they say it is a film from 2012 and a World Premiere. However, I’ve also seen that the film is from 2006. Furthermore, it was shown at last Gijon Film Fest…

When the concert of Ingrid was screened in Gijon, I did not really considered it as a proper film. It is something I shot a few years ago and it was a document, part of my retrospective. But Olivier Père, who is at the head of the Locarno Film festival, saw it a few weeks ago and invited it. Now, in 2012, I consider it more like a film of mine.

- I’ve read you are into a new film about Yves Saint Laurent. What can you advance me about this new project?

I am finishing the script and start to cast. It is a film that takes place between 1965 and 1976, the craziest years of Yves’s life, the most creative and destructive at the same time.