Yahoo Sports In ‘Pleasure,’ a Young Woman Navigates the Dark Side of Porn
The porn industry sells sex, but more than that, it sells the illusion that its male and female performers are deriving great personal and carnal satisfaction from their work. There’s thus plenty of loaded meaning to the title of Pleasure, director Ninja Thyberg’s drama about a young Swedish woman who arrives in Los Angeles determined to be the next adult film superstar, which premiered at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival and lands in U.S. theaters on May 13 in an explicit, unrated cut. Portraying what it’s like to navigate the business from a first-person insider perspective (replete with a cast of real-life X-rated vets), the film may not have something altogether revelatory to say about its subject, but it nonetheless incisively and authentically contends that in this rugged world, a good deal of the women aren’t actually enjoying themselves.
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Upon touching down in LA, Linnéa (Sofia Kappel) assumes the stage moniker Bella Cherry and moves into a “model house” that she shares with other aspiring starlets and is owned and run by Mike (Jason Toler), her agent and de facto pimp. Before even providing such details, however, Pleasure opens with 19-year-old Bella at her maiden porn shoot, which is prefaced by a ritual that involves signing a consent form, OK-ing her $900 fee, guaranteeing that she’s not under the influence of drugs or alcohol, agreeing to provide a medical test that confirms she has no sexually transmitted diseases, and showing her ID and a newspaper to an iPhone camera to verify her age. The last of those makes the entire affair feel like a quasi-hostage situation, and that impression continues once she does her raunchy thing for a collection of guys whose chuckling and bluntly dirty talk is as unsettling as their faux-soothing suggestions—once she has second thoughts—to “overcome it and push past it, but no pressure!”
That scenario will play out again in Pleasure, and in increasingly harrowing forms, as Bella endeavors to overcome her qualms and transform herself into a smut queen. At that initial shoot, she’s told by Bear (Chris Cock) to watch her back at her new residence because her housemates are liable to steal from her and backstab her for gigs. This causes her to cast an immediately wary eye at them all, including Joy (Revika Anne Reustle), a brash newcomer from Florida who, during an ensuing round of interviews with producers, announces her willingness to do everything and anything under the sun. Joy’s references to creampies, gangbangs, blowbangs, anal and more indicate not only her lack of inhibition but also her hands-on knowledge about the field, and while it doesn’t necessarily translate into success for her, it educates the more naïve Bella about the anything-goes lengths required to make it big.
That lesson is further hammered home when she attends a photo shoot whose center of attention is Ava (Evelyn Claire), who Bella learns is a “Spiegler girl” represented by mega-agent Mark Spiegler (playing himself). Ava is an alluring beauty, as well as an arrogant and condescending competitor, and she laughs at Bella’s inexperience with posing for layout photos, compelling Joy to come to her rescue—and, in the process, to reveal herself as a trustworthy friend. Camaraderie isn’t enough to endure in this profession, though; a thick skin and aptitude for wincing through misery are more relevant and necessary skills. Bella gleans that fact on her own and from the stories of her housemates, one of whom flippantly reveals that Mike once sent her to a gig that wound up being simply a client with a never-used camera—a blatant prostitution job that she went along with because, after all, the guy paid in cash.
Pleasure knows about that which it speaks. It layers its action with various touches that provide insight into the day-to-day grind of making it in porn, be it the endless selfies and videos taken in bedrooms and hotel rooms for promotional social-media accounts, to the parties where networking is the norm on red carpets and around swanky pools, to the warped creepiness of the porn sets themselves. Those absurdly opulent homes and dank warehouses, it turns out, are populated almost exclusively by men who feign compassion for their female counterparts as a means of convincing them to degrade themselves for the camera and those interested in consuming such content—which, as Bella’s trip to the AVN expo in Las Vegas proves, are mostly male. Whether it’s an S&M gig in which Bella is tied up in knots and dangled from the ceiling while being choked, or a far rougher two-on-one that threatens to break her spirit—forcing her to choose between her guilt and failure, or her shame and ambition—the film captures and soberly censures this universe for its ugly systemic misogyny.
While Thyberg and Peter Modestij’s script trades in graphicness, their film refuses to objectify Bella in the same manner that her industry does; cinematographer Sophie Winqvist Loggins’ camera remains respectful and inquisitive as Bella chases her dream via ever-more-hardcore opportunities. A captivating Kappel exudes a mixture of sensitivity, drive and cynicism that’s necessary for traversing this milieu, and in her many close-ups, she conveys the toll this toil takes on performers—and the thought processes required to keep soldiering on.
Bella’s debasement peaks with a betrayal, as well as a subsequent scene where she’s asked to assume the male role in a lesbian encounter and relishes the opportunity to dish out what she’s previously been forced to take. Pleasure is a portrait of a business in which men use women for their own ends, and then convince those same women that this is how things operate—and, as a result, that they should behave likewise. In such an environment, corruption is inevitable, and the only way to survive it, at least according to Thyberg’s film, is to first accept that talk of empowerment and pleasure are merely tools used by manipulators to get what they want, and then to stop the car and ditch the ride before it destroys you completely.
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