Ninja Thyberg’s feature debut is an unremittingly hardcore ride through the adult film industry’s darkest corners
Pleasure is a film about the porn business unlike anything you’ve seen before. It opens on the sound of fucking, spitting and slapping and gets steadily more grim from there, taking the viewer on an unremittingly hardcore ride through the industry’s darkest corners. Directed by Swedish filmmaker Ninja Thyberg in her feature debut, it’s most certainly an achievement of some kind, perhaps even an important one. I’m just not sure who would sign up to watch it.
A former anti-porn activist, Thyberg made her film with a cast of industry professionals, and it’s emphatically X-rated. (A24 lost out on distribution rights to the film after promising to release a watered-down, R-rated cut.) Big swinging dicks are everywhere you look, as are the sweating paunches of the guys who wield them – but Pleasure is just as notable for what it doesn’t show. Instead of the expected shots of unsimulated sex (which was all faked), Thyberg’s camera lingers longest on the cameras trained on its protagonist, Bella Cherry, and the male performers on set, whispering kind words of reassurance to their co-star one minute, wanking off absent-mindedly the next to maintain ‘wood’. It’s surreal and even a little disarming, until suddenly it’s not.
At the centre of Thyberg’s film is Bella, an aspiring adult-film star freshly arrived in LA from Sweden. Bella is played with astonishing poise by Sofia Kappel, a first-time actor who, incredibly, applied for the part after her CBT therapist suggested she try doing something that made her “uncomfortable”. Critics love to talk about actors and actresses – but mostly actresses – being “fearless” in roles, but this is something else completely, and Kappel brings a sweet vulnerability to the character that does not diminish her ambition.
As Bella makes her way through the industry, she learns that the power to say no also has the power to hurt her career. Pushing aside her personal boundaries to get herself noticed, she seeks work in increasingly hardcore shoots. An initial BDSM gig goes well, but she soon finds herself in trouble when acting out a gang-rape scenario on a shoot with three male performers. When she tells her co-stars she cannot continue, their faux-concern for Bella’s welfare turns quickly to anger (“This is what YOU chose to do, right?”), reinforcing our suspicions that these men are simply acting out their ugliest fantasies for an audience of rank misogynists. Later, when she tells her agent she was worried she would get raped for real, he dismisses her concerns irritatedly: “We don’t throw that word around here.”
This is entirely the point, of course, and most likely a big part of why Thyberg’s film has met with anger among industry professionals, including some members of the cast. In the world that Pleasure depicts, consent is respected only as long as it doesn’t disrupt the normal functioning of (male) power, a state of affairs which Thyberg lays bare in scenes that resonate far beyond the film’s porn-biz setting, and echo some of the response to the #MeToo movement. When Bella signs with a top agent who only works with girls for whom nothing is off-limits, he warns her not to cause any “drama” on set, a codeword obviously intended to have a chilling effect on anyone tempted to speak out on abusive behaviour. Through another disturbing scene, we see how the misogyny inherent in so much of the industry is internalised by its female performers, when an actress who’s just been brutalised by a woman co-star during a shoot receives an apology for her behaviour. “What for?” she replies.
Thyberg’s gaze is pitiless, but Pleasure is not entirely without warmth. There are some touching moments between Bella and her male co-star, Bear (Chris Cock), who jokes sadly about the racist logic of interracial porn (“the most extreme act you can do”), and Bella shares some tender scenes with her porn-actress flatmates before her career drives a wedge between them. In a couple of nicely judged scenes on set, Pleasure illustrates the need for women on both sides of the camera to foster safer working environments in porn – just one way, perhaps, that an industry which pays lip service to consent while catering to some of society’s darkest impulses might be improved.
