Pleasure

Pleasure Crews

Pleasure
Sweden/Netherlands/France 2022
Directed by Ninja Thyberg
Mubi

Pleasure, directed and co-written by Ninja Thyberg, is a really interesting look at the US porn scene. In terms of content, it’s a little like the wonderful movie Boogie Nights... but with all the humour taken out of it. So what you end up with is a fairly chilled portrayal of a Swedish model going by her new ‘stage name’ Bella Charry, as she flies into the US to make her fortune shooting porn movies. On her voyage she is put through the ringer, so to speak... as we see her transformed from ‘naive, erotic starlet on the make’ into something less humanised and much more like the people who take advantage of her, to a certain extent.

That’s all I’m going to tell you about the plot and I’ll also say that there’s not a lot of compromise on the limits of the approach to the material. I mean, it’s not (quite) what you’d see in various extreme, hard core porn films but the dramatisation is close and, of course, since the director is using a less simplistic agenda in terms of the way the camera frames, reveals and hides certain information... well, although the content is slightly less extreme than the porn shoots it’s trying to emulate, it certainly feels way more because the crew is much more subjective about what the director is trying to say, rather than just using the material to arouse.

The film is filled with men and women who work in the sex industry. So we have porn stars, porn directors and porn producers... and it’s grim and gritty but the real life angle is that the main protagonist Bella, is played by a newcomer to movies in pretty much her first feature film shoot. That person, who gives an absolutely amazing performance in this, is called Sofia Kappel and, certain parts of this shoot must have been quite gruelling for her. For example, while the BDSM suspension sequence is maybe toned down for the actress to a certain extent (although you can certainly see the rope marks on her body in a scene), with the edit allowing a certain amount of shielding going on in terms of the impact play etc... the rough sex scene where she’s dominated by two guys who lay into her with ‘abuse’ which is bordering on the thin line between consensual and non-consensual, must have certainly not been faked for certain moments, surely pushing the actress through towards some agreed limit edges.

And the really interesting thing is, according to the IMDB,  that this newcomer of an actress actually applied for the role to be deliberately placed out of her comfort zone in order to aid her own cognitive behaviour therapy. I guess it must have worked out for her because I notice she’s already completed her second movie, which looks to be a relatively high profile horror film that I hope I’ll get the opportunity to see at some point soon.

So, yeah, a great performance from the lead actress and also, I might add, some of the porn stars in this who do a really good job with the ‘straight’ stuff. But the other thing that makes it so watchable is some nicely lit, fluid photography and it’s coupled with some brilliant sound design which, actually, really elevates the film. So what the director will do is she’ll pitch dual pieces of audio content against each other in juxtaposition, sometimes even within the same scene. The opening credits is a give away for her modus operandi throughout the movie. Starting off with a piece of sound that obviously comes from the unseen part of the rough sex scene from later in the movie (deep throat gagging etc) it then lapses into some beautiful, ethereal music as a direct contrast to this and it’s something which happens throughout the film, when the surface ugliness of a scene is suddenly given a bit of tension release by almost religious, vocal stylings on the soundtrack.

Another thing she’ll do with the sound on a couple of occasions, is to suddenly drop it out completely. So a particularly intense sex scene, for example, would suddenly lapse into silence, as if to force the audience to concentrate on the purely visual aspects of the footage and thus reenforce the intensity of the visual experience in those moments. And it’s a technique that’s used in different ways throughout the film, which allows an agreeable aesthetic clash between the visceral nature of certain brutally chill moments and those which suddenly seem almost poetic in terms of the music and visual imagery. It’s a nice mix of aural and visual moments (not to mention oral and visual moments, I guess) and, along with the quite amazing performances from the cast... Sofia Kappel and porn star Zelda Morrison in particular (the latter coming across almost like a young Shirley MacLaine)... it serves to make the entire cocktail of elements quite a potent mix, it has to be said.

And that’s me pretty much done with this one. I should probably warn potential viewers that Pleasure might be quite raw and edgy to watch for some people, dependent on the amount of extreme, hardcore porn you’ve personally seen (is my guess). But it is an interesting movie with something to be said about the gradual reduction of a human being and the way in which a certain kind of personality processes the kinds of experiences shown in the story. Definitely worth a look.