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-your-cake-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.
