House of the Sleeping Beauties

Not even the august presence of Maximilian Schell can dispel the odor of fusty smut that clings to “House of the Sleeping Beauties,” a clammy meditation on sex, death and the endless fascination of unclothed innocence.
This third film adaptation of Yasunari Kawabata's morbid novella stars Vadim Glowna (who also writes and directs) as Edmond, a wealthy sexagenarian haunted by the long-ago deaths of his wife and daughter. His depression lifts when a friend (Mr. Schell) suggests a visit to a bizarre brothel where lonely old men can snuggle up to beautiful, drugged young virgins and grope them at will. When the slumbering girls awake, they conveniently remember nothing, which is probably just as well.
Though the seductively filmed fondling sessions — during which Edmond, his erotic excitement visibly growing, natters incessantly to his near-comatose companions — can be creepily mesmerizing, the whisper of necrophilia is impossible to ignore. And when an evening with what the establishment's forbidding Madame (Angela Winkler) incomprehensibly calls “a trainee” ends in disaster, that whisper becomes a roar that the film's feeble digression into thriller territory is unable to mute.
Mr. Glowna has said that such a house actually existed in Berlin in the 1920s and '30s. If so, its clientele probably resembled the target audience for this movie.
Da The New York Times, 14 Novembre 2008