“The Countess is Dead”. Metamorphosed pictorial inheritances in l’Apollonide (Bertrand Bonello, 2011)

Abstract

We intend to trace the pictorial heritage that emerges in the staging of L'Apollonide, Souvenirs of the maison closee (Bertrand Bonello, 2011), whose meaning transcends the mere ambience of the time. Post-impressionist toilettes, symbolist orientalisms and outings to impressionistic landscapes are part of the references of which the film is nourished and, at the same time, metamorphosizes in order to write a story detained in the eternal ending of the nineteenth century, whose laconic tedium and militant artificiality are no obstacle to the ruthless irruption of barbarism. Starting from the identification of intertextualities and the textual analysis of filmic materiality, we propose that L'Apollonide apprehends the aesthetic and the decadent feeling of French art in the twilight of the century to build a story that humanizes —through a contemporary look— the day-to-day life of the prostitutes who work in an elitist brothel about to shutting. The configuration of the mise-en-scène demands the identifiction of certain pictorial referents key in order to rethink, redraw and propose a reverse to the myth of the pictorial femme fatale.