House of Tolerance

Bertrand Bonello's fifth feature competed at Cannes in 2011 and divided the festival, which is roughly what it was built to do. Shot almost entirely within one set — a brothel in Paris between 1899 and 1900 — it refuses both the period film's usual tourism and the subject's usual moralising, and instead simply stays in the building.

The ensemble is the point: Hafsia Herzi, Céline Sallette, Adèle Haenel, Jasmine Trinca and others as women whose working conditions are set out with the precision of a documentary about a factory. Debts to the house, medical inspections, the same clients, the same rooms, the champagne accounted for. Josée Deshaies shoots in candle-warm interiors and split screens; the soundtrack drops anachronistic soul records into 1900 and the effect is neither ironic nor cute.

It is one of the most formally confident French films of the decade and among the least sentimental treatments of sex work in European cinema — no rescue narrative, no punishment, just labour and time passing. Bonello's The Beast is already in the catalogue; this is the film that made his reputation, and it holds up better than most of what shared that competition with it.