“I have made an effort to get hold of the images in which the experience of the big city is precipitated in a child of the middle class. I believe it possible that a fate expressly theirs is held in reserve for such images. No customary forms await them yet. . . . But, then, the images of my metropolitan childhood perhaps are capable, at their core, of preforming later historical experience. I hope they will at least suggest how thoroughly the person spoken of here would later dispense with the security allotted his childhood.”
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If someone were to attempt a movie adaptation of Berlin Childhood, it might look something like House of Pleasures, the new film by French writer-director Bertrand Bonello that screens this week at the Gene Siskel Film Center. The movie takes place just before and after the turn of the 20th century; it emphasizes setting over character and plot; and it casts a mood that’s both eerie and entrancing. Though it’s set in a brothel, it presents prostitution much like Benjamin described socks or sewing kits in Berlin Childhood—as the material representation of an extinct worldview. Bonello can be as eccentric a filmmaker as Benjamin was a writer, emphasizing his clinical detachment from the period through odd directorial choices: he scores several scenes to 60s R&B, for instance, and he seems to have cast several of the nonprofessional players for their inability to evoke a past era.
The Appolonide is filled with the sort of delicate and ornate decor that signified social respectability in this era. Since the film’s budget was relatively small, however (just under four million euros), Bonello conveys the opulence through minimalist means. In an interview conducted for the film’s press materials, he explained that his cinematographer, Josée Deshaies, hung black velvet on the walls in certain shots in order to emphasize the few antique props and costumes he could afford. Other times the film suggests the whole environment through the close-up of a single revealing item. Strategies like these come to suggest a visual analogue to Benjamin’s prose, giving heightened presence to certain details while keeping others deliberately fuzzy. They also shape the storytelling in unusual ways: in a characteristic sequence, Bonello abruptly cuts away from a shot of intercourse to consider a ladybug crawling across a banister.
Directed by Bertrand Bonello
