For rent: "House of Tolerance"

Bertrand Bonello's House of Tolerance is, on a fairly basic level, pretty French girls in various states of déshabillée, and that, I suspect, will be enough for some. This is a study of day-to-day life in a high-class French brothel, either side of the year 1900. The high-class bit is crucial. "This is not a knocking-shop," insists the establishment's madam (Noémie Lvovsky, one of a number of directors appearing before the camera here), and we see how her girls work to attract a higher calibre of gentleman - the type who might marry them (and, in doing so, pay off their debts), yet equally those so privileged, and so accustomed to getting what they want from life, that they might believe they can possess these girls in other ways. It's a knife-edge relationship, literalised when one john (jean?) takes a blade to the corners of one prostitute's mouth, leaving her with a ghastly scar-smile.

Bonello has two intents here - or three, if you count the baser one of getting up-and-coming actresses to disrobe for him. On one level, House of Tolerance is meant as a celebration of sisterhood: all equal in the eyes of their female employer, these girls curl up together on chaises longues, swap beauty and lovemaking tips, and on quiet Monday evenings, bust out the opium pipe. I'd be hesitant to claim the film as a wholly feminist text - too easy to read it as an ageing French director's expression of nostalgia for a time when ladies had a certain rondeur around the hips - but Bonello achieves a jolting mini-coup in the closing moments in cutting from this maison close to footage of those skinny, sad-eyed women walking latter-day Parisian peripheries in search of clients; the film comes out in favour of better organised, even outright legalised, prostitution.

The film's second intent is perhaps more critical yet: Bonello wants to show us how in the first years of the twentieth century, the ruling classes started to set down the links between sex and money that would eventually come to deface (if you will, fuck up) almost everything beautiful about human intimacy. The brothel's beauty regime is precisely that: a regime, as oppressive as any other in its insistence its subjects buy perfume to cover up their own scent, and remain in peak physical (and gynaecological) fitness, the better to be put on sale. The bottom line of this particular workplace: look nice, smell nice, shake your moneymaker, coin it in. If Bonello's nostalgia seems strangely reticent and indistinct, it may be because these specific conditions haven't changed so very much over the intervening years.

Making a movie from the prostitute's point-of-view at the very least provides a challenging corrective to the masculine BS of Shame, which tried to get us to feel something, anything for a guy who could afford to hire any woman he wanted. Bonello is not the first French director to explore the commercialisation of sex, though, and he does tend to privilege the static: take his 2001 film The Pornographer, which plunged us rather too successfully into the mind-numbing, soul-destroying repetition of a skinflick shoot, or 2003's Tiresia, effectively a hostage movie with an arty confusion of genders attached to it. Bonello still films tableaux, of the kind the once similarly unyielding Catherine Breillat has progressed beyond. His sets here are as well-dressed as his performers are under-dressed - there's even a recurring cameo for a live black panther, finally unleashed on one client in an act of catty, feminine vengeance - and all this furniture gets in the way of any narrative drive.

In the director's favour this time, he is at least aware of this: he uses split-screen effects to break up some of the stasis, giving certain passages the look of the rummest ever episode of 24 (hey, these girls stay up all night, too), or - perhaps more intentionally - the choice of viewing options in a sex-shop porno booth. And some of the tableaux are fascinating in their own way, populated by spirited performers whom you can well imagine having fun off-camera underarm hair-growing contests: Adèle Haenel (from Water Lilies) has a truly weird bit playing the kind of hollowed-out marionette her clients want; the insouciant Hafzia Herzi goes further than her Couscous bellydancing routine as the brothel's resident exotic pearl; and Alice Barnole is a haunting presence as the scarred prostitute referred to as The Woman Who Laughs.

It builds towards a wake for a smallpox victim, set to the Moody Blues' "Nights in White Satin" - a farty music cue that should misfire in the middle of this period piece as much as "Pretty Vacant" does in the middle of W.E., yet which in fact fits the film's precise, hothouse mood more or less perfectly. Only once leaving the confines of its location - for a Renoiresque sequence of bathing in a lake - House of Tolerance is almost stiflingly atmospheric: "It smells of sperm and champagne in here," notes Lvovsky's madam, and one dreads to think what those cinemas playing it are going to pong of by the end of the run. Two hours of it, however, may just be enough: by the time one of the girls is given cause to rue "fucking is a fuck-awful job", one gets the impression Bonello may just be thrashing over old ground with new boobs.

House of Tolerance is in selected cinemas.