Félvilág - 2015 - 6/10
AKA - Demimonde
The wicker basket floats in the Danube. Curious souls drag it ashore, open it, revealing a corpse.
Then … four days earlier …
A young girl, desperate, applies for a position as maid, cook, whatever. She has no references.
Almost on a whim, she is hired, and enters a suffocating world.
The madam, once a courtesan at her peak, is now mistress to a powerful man, and her youth is fading.
She sees “something” in the girl, and despite the top maid’s warnings, the innocent follows into the cloistered world of cigar smoke, whisky tumblers, sheer lace, and discreet staircases.
Gorgeous film from Hungary, eroticism tightly restrained.