31. Nights In White Satin &...

Lyrics

Nights in white satin,
Never reaching the end,
Letters I've written,
Never meaning to send.

Beauty I'd always missed
With these eyes before,
Just what the truth is
I can't say anymore.

'Cause I love you,
Yes, I love you,
Oh, how, I love you.

Gazing at people,
Some hand in hand,
Just what I'm going thru
They can understand.

Some try to tell me
Thoughts they cannot defend,
Just what you want to be
You will be in the end,

And I love you,
Yes, I love you,
Oh, how, I love you.
Oh, how, I love you.

Nights in white satin,
Never reaching the end,
Letters I've written,
Never meaning to send.

Beauty I'd always missed
With these eyes before,
Just what the truth is
I can't say anymore.

'Cause I love you,
Yes, I love you,
Oh, how, I love you.
Oh, how, I love you.

'Cause I love you,
Yes, I love you,
Oh, how, I love you.
Oh, how, I love you.

(+ in the extended version)

Breath deep
The gathering gloom
Watch lights fade
From every room
Bedsitter people
Look back and lament
Another day's useless
Energy spent

Impassioned lovers
Wrestle as one
Lonely man cries for love
And has none
New mother picks up
And suckles her son
Senior citizens
Wish they were young

Cold hearted orb
That rules the night
Removes the colours
From our sight
Red is gray and
Yellow white
But we decide
Which is right
And
Which is an Illusion 


This is a good time for movie fans to live in. There is more access to more movies than ever before. Besides that, there are more possibilities than ever before to read, write and talk about movies. There are countless of interesting blogs with interesting articles about movies. And let's not forget IMDB. Many movies I discuss in my blog I found through IMDB and these blogs. I am quite certain that I wouldn't have known of some of this movies if it weren't for the internet. One of these interesting websites/blogs is www.murielawards.org. Each year on this site several bloggers come together to rank their top 10 movies the year, the top 10 actors, top 10 actresses, etc. All these votes are then accumulated and you get a definitive list, based on the lists of all these bloggers. It's not very complicated and there are probably dozens of other sites where such things happen. I just happen to know this one. In 2011 the particpants chose The Tree of Life as the best movie of that year. But the reason I'm writing all of this here is an interesting result in the category 'best cinematic moment.' The winner was the creation sequence in The Tree of Life, but in 8th place was something called 'the Nights in White Satin dance' in House of Pleasures, a movie I didn't know anything about.
Before starting my piece on the movie it is worth noting that I've hardly wrote anything about the song itself. There is not much I can write about it. I don't like this song and I don't know anything about the Moody Blues.

The Movie: L'Appolonide (House of Pleasures) (Bertrand Bonello, 2011)

I was quite interested to see this movie. I had found the 'Nights in White Satin' scene on YouTube and I found it an interesting, intriguing sequence. I also found Roger Ebert's 3,5 star review of the film, so I had some high hopes. Unfortunately though I must say that I didn't like this movie at all. Perhaps I should've seen it coming. This is a, what one would call, arty-farty French drama about a high class brothel in 1900. That is not really my cup of tea. But I believe that this wouldn't be a good movie in any case. The director doesn't seem to have an idea of what kind of movie he wants to make, or what to do with the characters and the setting.

The 'Nights in White Satin' scene is indeed the best and most interesting scene in the movie. The mood of the song does actually seem to fit the movie, at least when the movie is blurring the lines between reality and dreams and intends to be a melodramatic story about the melancholy, sometimes romanticized lives of the prostitutes and their clients. Sometimes though the movie wants to be a realistic, stark portrayal of life in the brothel. These two approaches don't mesh at all. But, back to the sequence. We see the prostitutes dance with each other mysteriously, while on the soundtrack we hear Nights in White Satin. They are mourning because one of their 'colleagues' had just died of syphillis. The sequence has a surrealist feel from the start and becomes only weirde. After a while we cut to a woman in a another room and the music stops. We assume a new scene has just started. But then we follow this woman as she goes to the saloon, where all the women are dancing. And as she approaches the saloon we hear Nights in White Satin clearer and clearer. And when she finally enters the saloon, we hear the song as well as at the beginning of the scene. This implies that the song is diegetic, meaning that it comes form within the world of the film. This is obviously weird considering that the song is from 1967 and the movie takes place in 1900. After this sequence the movie goes into full surrealist mode and becomes quite interesting and absurd. Unfortunately this is too little too late. All of this happens in the last 15 minutes of the film. And the movie manages to ruin even this by ending on a completely false note. I'll talk later about this.

Before this sequence the movie is incredibly dull and dreary. The problems start with the depiction of the brothel. The movie wants to present the brothel as a claustrophobic, mysterious place. Thus for the first hour or so, we never get a sense of the geography of the brothel. Scenes take place in seemingly random rooms and we hardly have an idea what the purpose of most of these rooms is, or how big the brothel really is. This is quite disorienting, but to not much effect. Besides that we hardly see the rooms where we are in. The characters inside the rooms are often the only ones who are well lit. The rest of the room is usually in darkness. This invites us to focus mostly on the characters, but they are quite uninteresting. The movie has an often weirdly romanticized view of prostitution, while at the same time making both the prostitutes and the clients so uninteresting, that it almost makes you wonder how anyone ever could go to a brothel for pleasure. The prostitutes talk uninterestingly and repetitively about their daily lives in the brothel. They are sometimes unhappy, but the prostitutes are mostly presented as living quite happily. They love each other and their madam, and sometimes they do enjoy pleasuring their clients. We only exit the brothel once. The prostitutes are on a day out near some lake. And while I was grateful, that the movie finally cut away from that darkness, that scene exemplified exactly what's wrong with the movie. Like many other scenes, this scene follows another scene, in a completely random way. Besides that the scene seems to have no clear purpose or reason to be in the movie. It's just plain pointless and dull.

There are scenes that are even more problematic. One of the prostitutes, Madeleine, has been the victim of a masochist, who cut her face during one session with her. The movie seems quite unimaginative in showing her afterwards. She is basically made to look like the Joker from The Dark Knight. This resemblance is at times so enormous, that it seems that the movie did this deliberately. I find it hard to believe that no one involved in this movie could have been oblivious to this resemblance. Her appearance therefore often seems like some kind of sick joke. But it gets even more problematic. Due to her appearance Madeleine now can't get any clients, but the madam still lets her work in the brothel, doing the laundry, making breakfast, etc. After a while though the brothel has financial problems. So the madam sells Madeleine to some wealthy French aristocrat who has some sort of brothel for freaks. Here Madeleine has to have sex with people who aroused by her disfigurement. The movie seems to condemn this, yet it pays lots of (loving) attention to this sex scene. This is quite an exploitative scene. Now, I don't have a problem with exploitative scenes. I just found it strange that the director doesn't see that he is doing exactly what he condemns.

I did really dislike the final scene. In the last seconds of the movie, we suddenly cut to the present time. We see an unhappy, utterly unglamorous prostitute walking on the street. Then we see a car drive by and stop. Out of this car comes another unhappy, unglamorous prostitute. This feels like an elaborate attempt to make some sort of stupid point about our current times. This scene is totally unsupported by the movie that preceded it. Besides what exactly is the point the point that it wants to make? That prostitutes now are treated like trash and have horrible lives? As opposed to, what, the great lives they had in the 1900 when prostitution was all fun and games, and they were all treated with respect? Really? That's quite possibly the most stupid and idiotic point the movie could make.