Bibliothèque Pascal
Bibliothèque Pascal
| 08 June 2010 (USA)
Bibliothèque Pascal Trailers

A single mother's struggle to support her child leads her into the surreal netherworld of illegal sexual enterprises, with her finally ending up in the Bibliothèque Pascal; an elegant but bizarre house of prostitution in which men can re-enact sexual scenarios inspired by great works of literature for a hefty fee.

Reviews
ChicDragon It's a mild crowd pleaser for people who are exhausted by blockbusters.
Catangro After playing with our expectations, this turns out to be a very different sort of film.
Helllins It is both painfully honest and laugh-out-loud funny at the same time.
Janae Milner Easily the biggest piece of Right wing non sense propaganda I ever saw.
writeyibo I consider this a master piece! It is a rated adult fairy tale. It is a dream projected to the viewers. It has distinctive story telling. The sound compilation and cinematography are both great. The film creates such an impact you either love it or hate it. Sex and violence always catches viewers attention.But it has never been done this way!The film is absurd and surreal. Director Szabolcs Hajdu is not afraid of taking the risk.And be who he really is! I haven't seen something raw powerful and original like this movie for a while.
Davor Blazevic Hungarian-German-British-Romanian co-production movie Bibliothèque Pascal (spoken mainly in Romanian, occasionally in English, while Hungarian is used extensively only in a single theatrical monologue) deals with the heavy subject of human trafficking and sex trade, presented through an imaginative world of the main character, (in)voluntary victim of a modern day slavery, who, in her attempt to reclaim custody of her little daughter, (un)knowingly resorts to fairy-talish description of how she met and lost a man who fathered her daughter and what extraordinary powers little Viorica inherited from him, of good causes she followed to accept her foreign (sexploitive) engagement, and of the imaginative way her "services" were delivered. The only mild objection that can be given to the movie is that everything in it, revolving around Mona Paparu, quietly radiating leading character of subdued expression (brought to the screen by brilliant, classically beautiful Hungarian actress Orsolya Török-Illyés), her life, at first as a traveling artist in the puppet theatre, and later as "Jeanne D'Arc" in stylish chambers of the title "library", inhabited with prostitutes for high-end clientèle, impersonating famous characters from literature (ranging from Desdemona and Ophelia to Dorian Gray and Pinocchio) is too nice and polished for the ugly and rough reality the movie deals with--the very same sole objection that can be given to Guillermo del Toro's extraordinarily beautiful, phantasmagoric El laberinto del fauno (Pan's Labyrinth, 2006), in which a young girl escapes from brutalities of life and her ruthless stepfather, army captain in WW2 fascist-ruled Spain, into the fascinating world of her own imagination--confronting guilt and innocence, violence and kindness, coldness and compassion
simonasidorin I do not have a shadow of a doubt to rate this movie with a 10 out of 10 , and I know I am not the only one who like it a lot. Probably is the best movie of the year 2010. Maybe if you already read the plot you got an idea about the movie but as the expression states:SEEING IS BELIEVING you we'll realize that this is exactly the case; You have to see it ! It is so rare nowadays to see real directors with good ideas , imagination and directors who tells us stories , now when everything is cheap and kitsch most of the Hollywood movies are remakes or you got the impression they got nothing to offer .As I mentioned in the title this movie is marked by a magical realism but is not like Gabriel Garcia Marquez or Isabel Allende or another Latin American writer the magical realism is European or should I locate it to the central and eastern Europe. They are no stereotypes about eastern europeans or politics in this movie , and there is a story , you just have to be patient , actually the movie is about story telling from the moment Mona starts to tell the story of herself and her daughter and later on at the fair and at the end in the furniture store.
Avery Hudson Single mother Mona Paparu (Orsolya Török-Illyés) must convince a bureaucrat in child protective services that she should regain custody of her young daughter, who she left in the care of an aunt while working as a prostitute in England. No, that's not right.Through a series of unfortunate events, young Mona finds herself stripped of her passport in a modern-day slave market, bought by Pascal (Shamgar Amram), who runs bordello where the elite of the worlds of art, politics, and business purchase the services of sexual slaves representing figures of literature (Joan of Arc, Pinocchio, Desdemona, etc). No. That's not it either.A tale of the brutal sex traffic between the former USSR and the UK stands as a metaphor for the rape of imagination that rules the global culture business. Not one of these interpretations quite works.Once upon a time, a theatre buffet girl told her story to a filmmaker. Bibliothèque Pascal is first and foremost a fine movie – a dream projected onto our world to wake us up.A perfect cast, led by the luminous Orsolya Török-Illyés, who once seen can never be forgotten.