House of Pleasures

The genesis of the project was a merge of two film ideas Bertrand Bonello had been thinking of. About ten years earlier he had tried to make a film about modern brothels, but the project had been cancelled. After finishing De la guerre from 2008, Bonello decided that he wanted his next film to be about dynamics within a group of females, and his partner suggested a film about prostitutes in a historical setting. The director then became interested in the aspect of a brothel as a closed world from the viewpoint of the prostitutes. The idea of a scar in the form of a smile came from the film The Man Who Laughs, an adaptation of Victor Hugo's novel with the same name. Bonello says he dreamed about the film two nights in a row while he was writing House of Tolerance, and decided to include a female character with such a scar. (official distributor synopsis)