MAISON CLOSE Season One/Mabrouk El Mechri, director/Arrow Films Blu-ray  This handsome Blu-ray set showcases a remarkable television series (one that is — in its frankness — not for the narrow-minded). The setting is a 19th-century brothel in Paris, and the eight-part series is distinguished from earlier similar dramas (notably Louis Malle’s Pretty Baby) by the modern sensibility with which the material is treated. Its sexual nature echoes another ground-breaking piece of period drama, which also had an uncompromising sex-for-hire theme, the television adaptation of Michael Faber’s The Crimson Petal and the White. The central characters in Maison Close are a trio of prostitutes, who ply their trade in a well-appointed house of pleasure, ‘Paradise’, with a speciality client list including bluebloods and other notables of society. The basic impulse of the three women is to try to break free from the cloistered life, and the film’s treatment of the world of prostitution is never romanticised in the way that (for instance) the recent adaptation of Diary of a Call Girl was accused of being (the men are almost all universally appalling). Performances are utterly superlative, reminding us that the wealth of acting talent in France appears to be the equal of the more celebrated one in the United Kingdom.