House of Tolerance/L'appolonide: Souvenirs de la Maison Close

Directed by Bertrand Bonello. Starring Hafsia Herzi, Céline Sallette, Jasmine Trinca, Alice Barnole Club, IFI, Dublin, 125 min

HEAVEN SAVE us from middlebrow notions of sophisticated entertainment. Classical orchestras play the music of Queen. Pop stars make films about notorious royal romances. Distinguished theatre companies update the work of Jane Austen. Give me Adam Sandler dressed as a fat woman any day.

You won't encounter a more egregious example of the form than this stupefyingly boring period drama from Bertrand Bonello. Going among the sexual demi- monde of La Belle Époque, House of Tolerancedoes have a superficial beauty to it. The hazy images of semi-clad women call up reminders of those horrible soft-porn posters – often shot by the now-forgotten David Hamilton – that dimmer students used to plaster on their walls during the 1970s. The average Flake commercial exhibits more intellectual traction.

The film concerns itself with sex workers in a Parisian brothel at the turn of the last century. Early on, Madeline (Alice Barnole) has a horrific encounter with one of the establishment's more dastardly clients. He ties her to the bed and, while muttering sweet filth, makes incisions from either corner of her mouth to the corresponding ear. For the rest of the film – while we drag inexorably to the end of an era – the poor woman lurks around to offer assurances that the director remembers Conrad Veidt's disfigurement in the silent film The Man Who Laughs.

That scene nicely sums up the uneasy philosophies behind Bonello’s movie. Yes, the director understands that the women are involved in an imbalanced financial transaction. But the picture’s adolescent enthusiasm for its own queasy glamour implicates the film-makers (and, if we allow it, the viewer) in the characters’ exploitation.

House of Tolerancemight, however, qualify as a guilty pleasure if it weren't so appallingly sluggish, drearily claustrophobic and intellectually half-baked. Are we really meant to take seriously the scene during which the courtesans revel to the Moody Blues' Nights in White Satin? Maybe the director understands that only Alan Partridge now regards this song as the height of erotic sophistication. One fears not.

And what of the incident that sees a character – high on freebased metaphor – crying tears of pure white semen? Go to your room and think about what you’ve done, Bertrand. You’re a very silly wee boy.