Pleasure review – porn industry drama explores complex questions of consent
No fictional movie about porn is as revealing on the subject as actual porn, and however ironic or tragicomic or poignantly insightful, dramas like this are always suspect on the have-yourcake-and-eat-it issue of hitching a free ride on the dark fascination of porn itself. The greatest porn drama of our time is probably still Emma Stone’s classic SNL sketch about the serious actress who applies her method training to a brief role she gets in a porn film.
But Ninja Thyberg’s explicit movie (developed from an earlier short of the same title) is an interesting and even pioneering film on this issue because it is explicitly about consent: about the elaborate failsafe discussions that female performers in the adult industry have about what they’re comfortable with before shooting, and about what happens when they really try to say no at the last moment, and about what they wanted – what they consented to – in joining the industry in the first place. A young Swedish woman called Linnea changes her name to Bella Cherry and moves to LA to make it in porn: she is very well played here by newcomer Sofia Kappel, showing a transformation into a hardshelled sexbot. Initially freaked out by the hardcore stuff that people expect the serious contenders to do, Bella tearfully calls her mum in Sweden (who thinks she’s just doing an internship) and says she wants to come home; but her mum tells her to toughen up. So after one painfully graphic scene, Bella finds herself making it big in erotica, but in doing so experiences a crisis of loyalty to her new friend and fellow pornstar Joy (well played by real adult film performer Zelda Morrison) who is the only person in the business with a sense of humour.
Pleasure doesn’t take a doomily disapproving line on porn, and real pornstars and agents are given cameos. Yet neither is it necessarily celebratory or porn-positive. The people in charge are overwhelmingly male and Thyberg shows how the power relations in the business are really the same as they ever were.
• Pleasure is released on 15 June in cinemas and on 17 June on Mubi.