The House of Anissa Bonnefont (Wonder Boy) comes out this Wednesday in our dark rooms. Worn by Ana Girardot, this feature film inspired by a true story is prohibited for children under 16.
In La Maison, Ana Girardot plays Emma, a writer who, to write her new book, gets hired as a prostitute in a brothel in Berlin where prostitution is legal.
The feature film by Anissa Bonnefont (Wonder Boy) is adapted from the homonymous novel by Emma Becker. Published by Flammarion in August 2019, the book won the France Culture-Télérama prize and was among the finalists for the Renaudot prize.
In her book, the novelist talks about her experience of prostitution and her links with the women who work alongside her. The director also told us that she devoured Emma Becker’s book.
“I was absolutely fascinated by this woman who had the audacity and the courage to fully live her sexuality and her desire without asking questions about society and the judgment of others.
Not only did she go to live in Berlin where prostitution is legal and she entered this brothel in order to satisfy this fantasy she had since she discovered the literature of the Marquis de Sade.
I said to myself but what audacity to do that in the world in which we live! The discussions around the desire of women, the fact that women cannot have their bodies anywhere in the world… I found her audacity incredible and I really wanted to appropriate her novel and make a movie out of it.”
Rezo movies Ana Girardot
The novel describes sex scenes with clients and talks about the author’s sexual liberation. The film is very faithful to the original work. Ana Girardot appears naked in the same way as her fictional clients in suggestive pauses.
The film was therefore banned for those under 16.
But La Maison is not an erotic film. Each scene advances the story by presenting different clients and therefore different slices of life. The young father, the middle-aged man who has come to “train”, the doctor or even the dangerous pervert.
A humanist film
Anissa Bonnefont shows the daily life of a brothel, the relationships between the women, their real life and the different customers.
Rezo Films
Ana Girardot
If in the feature film the heroine has chosen to prostitute herself, the filmmaker wishes to emphasize that this is not the majority of cases.
She clarifies: “It’s also a humanist film because it tells a lot of stories. In the majority of cases, prostitution is not a choice, it is endured.
And in the much more painful story of the women who work alongside Emma, there is a very strong humanity that comes out of it and that touched me a lot. It was not the subject of my film because I chose to tell the particular story of this novelist, but it is important to underline it.“
La Maison will be released in theaters this Wednesday, November 16.