Playing with what makes something sexy

At this year’s Cannes Film Festival, two movies in the high-profile main competition each dealt with prostitution in their own distinctively confrontational way. “Sleeping Beauty,” the first feature by Australian writer-director Julia Leigh, focuses very closely on one contemporary young woman initiated into a secret world of privileged decadence. “House of Pleasures,” the fifth feature by French writer-director Bertrand Bonello, takes place within a bustling Parisian bordello as the 19th century gives way to the 20th, traditions falling aside to oncoming modernity.

Putting prostitution to work as a motivating metaphor is a long-standing trope in the cinema, used in films as diverse as the heady art-house provocations of Jean-Luc Godard, Louis Malle’s scandalous “Pretty Baby” and the pleasant Hollywood comforts of Garry Marshall’s “Pretty Woman.” So while both “Sleeping Beauty” and “House of Pleasures” have prostitution as part of their story and structure, they each stake out positions that are also about much more.

“The history of cinema is full of prostitute characters. I think cinema was created in 1895 and the first character appears by 1900, so very quickly she becomes a great character for movies,” Bonello said recently on the phone from Paris.

“But I think it’s because at the same time you can feel very close to the prostitute … and at the same time there is a big mystery. You don’t know how it works, what’s on her mind. And the mix of these two things make them great for movies. If you have mystery and desire, you want to understand.”

Both films deal with sex, but neither is particularly interested in titillating the viewer. Rather, each flirts with viewers’ expectations. In “House of Pleasures,” when the women of the house pair off with a man it is often to enact baroque fantasies bordering on the ridiculous, such as acting like a marionette or a geisha. In “Sleeping Beauty,” each man who encounters the sleeping woman reveals far more about his own pathology then he might in a more typical encounter.

However, that is not to say that the spectacle of women in varying states of undress goes entirely unnoticed in either film. It is exactly that teasing conflict (and occasional intersection) between the cerebral and the sexual that gives each film a unique charge, prodding at the underlying motivations of just what makes something sexy, to whom and why.

The world depicted in “House of Pleasures,” which is currently available on video-on-demand and which opens in Los Angeles on Dec. 16, sticks quite closely to the daily inner workings of its brothel, but outside influences constantly seep in. With the arrival of electricity or the opening of Paris’ Metro, even a shift from using crystal stemware to glass, it seems that the ways represented by the bordello are on the way out.

Though Bonello keeps the focus very much on the dynamic of the institution, the collective story of the house, he uses the stories of individual characters to point in different directions of possibility. The madame (Noémie Lvovsky) struggles with the obsolescence she knows is coming, even as a newcomer (Iliana Zabeth) enters the business at the exact worst time. One longtime employee (Alice Barnole) is forced into transition by a disfigurement, while another veteran (Céline Sallette) longs for a wealthy client to whisk her away.

In “Sleeping Beauty,” already available on video-on-demand and opening in Los Angeles on Friday, a female college student (Emily Browning, best familiar to audiences from this year’s “Sucker Punch”) works a series of odd jobs to make ends meet. Answering a vague advertisement, she gets hired by a private club to serve drinks to men while wearing only the scantiest of lingerie, which in turn leads to more unusual work. After drinking a strong sedative, she lies naked in a luxurious bedchamber and sleeps, aware only that the men who enter must obey the barest of ground rules. The rest will be unknown to her.

“What’s the phrase, ‘You say to-may-to, I say to-mah-to’? I think we’re in that territory,” the Sydney-based Leigh said during a recent stopover in New York on whether her film is intended as sexy. “It’s not a salacious, sexy-sexy film, but there are subtle things in it about sensuality.”

“A few people described it as an erotic drama, and I just thought that’s a really weird thing to say,” added Browning, on the phone from London. “I don’t find it erotic at all; the nude scenes are quite dark and disturbing.”

The low-key style of “Sleeping Beauty,” shot with long takes in an at times purposefully flat, affectless manner, renders what is happening on-screen all the more strange. In creating a dynamic where the character’s waking life and sleeping work begin to influence one another, Leigh’s film turns passivity into an act of willfulness.

“Sleeping Beauty” has a straightforward, unadorned style, clinical and quiet, while in “House of Pleasures,” Bonello points to a certain fin-de-siècle romanticism, rich and sumptuous, but then undercuts it at every turn. In showing the effects of syphilis, the daytime malaise of the women as they wait to work or even his use of more contemporary music such as soulful ‘60s R&B or the Moody Blues’ “Nights in White Satin,” Bonello reminds viewers of the darker realities behind his imagery.

“It’s very difficult to have nostalgia for something you haven’t known,” said Bonello. “But what I show in the film is not only luxury and pleasure and Champagne and joy, you have the prison, the disease, violence. So I don’t think it’s romanticized. It’s true there are some beautiful things, and I make a nice image of it, but for me it’s called ‘House of Pleasures,’ but only from the men’s side.”

The two films illustrate a contrast in how to engage with sexuality without making a movie that feels exploitative or sensationalized, right down to the costuming choices. Where in “House of Pleasures” the women wear outfits ornamented with period trimmings and layers, in “Sleeping Beauty,” even the lingerie feels spare and rather simple, functional straps replacing frilly finery.

Yet the filmmakers might still get a small kick out of their charged subject matter. Leigh prides herself on not revealing too much of her intentions in interviews, but she may have given away just a little bit of herself with the sly tickle in her voice when she noted of her costume choices, “Some people find that very sexy.”

calendar@latimes.com