Pornography is a tricky subject for mainstream or even respectable arthouse cinema, forcing film-makers to walk a fine line: veil or sanitise the subject too much and you lose any sense of authenticity; lean too far into its taboo realities and you risk running afoul of the censors yourself. Two new-to-streaming films take differing (and differently gendered) approaches to the American porn industry’s consumption of its performers.
Swedish director Ninja Thyberg’s striking debut, Pleasure, challenges viewers with frank imagery and endurance-testing scenes of sexual exploitation – though rather than feeling like a leering provocation, there’s a clinical ring of truth to it. Out now on Mubi (after a one-night-only cinema stint last week), it’s a tough, de-glittered spin on an oft-told story: young ingenue arrives in Los Angeles with stars in her eyes, only for her dreams to curdle on her. Except that Swedish immigrant Linnéa (an extraordinary Sofia Kappel) isn’t wholly disillusioned in the process.
Styling herself as Bella Cherry, she sets out to be the biggest name in hardcore porn, and is prepared to accept any number of indignities in the process. What she’s not prepared for is the mistreatment of other women required of her along the way. Largely relegating men to the background, Thyberg’s film makes its focus the community of female performers in the industry, and not cosily so. As Linnéa and her newfound pals bond over their common experience of misogyny, but also use it against each other, this remarkable film grows as ideologically complex as it is sexually candid.
Sean Baker’s Red Rocket (now on all major VOD platforms), on the other hand, takes as its subject Linnéa’s professional opposite: veteran male porn star Mikey Saber (Simon Rex), introduced returning to his squat Texas home town after the LA industry has spat him out – for unsavoury reasons, we’ll gradually surmise. But the still-buff wastrel has no intention of leaving porn behind just yet. Refashioning himself as a svengali, Saber fixes his attention on restless, 17-year-old doughnut shop cashier Strawberry (Suzanna Son), seeing in her his ticket back to California. Directed and performed with limber audacity, it’s a queasy, pitch-black satire of the grooming cycle.
Both films are intimate surveys relative to Paul Thomas Anderson’s raunchy, writhing LA porn-star epic Boogie Nights (Amazon), which is 25 years old this year and still dazzling. For a generation or two, it probably defined people’s ideas of what porn is like behind the scenes, even if the likes of Pleasure show no trace of its grimy communal warmth. Lovelace (2013; BFI Player), a lively biopic of the briefly celebrated Deep Throat star Linda Lovelace, shoots for the same freewheeling 70s vibe but never shakes off a sense of period cosplay, despite Amanda Seyfried’s committed performance. Shifting focus from performer to pornographer, Miloš Forman’s witty, politically astute The People vs. Larry Flynt (1996; Chili) isn’t much discussed these days, but its skewering of America’s religious right and hypocritical moral guardians is still tangy.
Not all porn-centred films have to be quite so serious. Brian De Palma’s delicious Hitchcockian riff Body Double (Apple TV) playfully runs the curtain-twitching mystery of Rear Window through the seamy sexual politics of the 80s VHS porn era, with an erotic performer as its femme fatale, and the politics of voyeurism refracted several times over. Kevin Smith’s Zack and Miri Make a Porno (2008; Google Play) uses the concept of amateur porn production as the basis for a positively homespun romcom; the late Lynn Shelton’s gay-panic comedy Humpday (2009; Amazon) did the same for modern bromance.
Such films stray pretty far from the harsher realities of porn, so we may as well extend to the wild, whimsical reverie of Taiwanese auteur Tsai Ming-liang’s gloriously eccentric, almost dialogue-free The Wayward Cloud (2004; BFI Player), in which a Taipei porn actor battles urban ennui, romantic melancholy and a nationwide water shortage that gives the humble watermelon unlikely erotic currency. Hardcore has never been so fluffy.
Also new on streaming and DVD
The Batman (Warner Bros) One of the year’s biggest box-office smashes is now available to rent on VOD, for anybody who didn’t fancy one three-hour sitting. I thought it a major disappointment – narratively lethargic and visually murky, exaggerating the doomy dourness of Christopher Nolan’s Batman era to self-parodic levels – but its admirers are many and ardent. See where you stand.
Fire Island (Disney+) After two lovely, low-key indies, Spa Night and Driveways, Korean American director Andrew Ahn goes broader and brighter with this gay romcom riff on Pride and Prejudice, relocated to the eponymous queer getaway off the New York coast. It’s perky and sometimes bawdily funny, though for a film concerned with modern inclusivity, it trades in some stale stereotypes.
Downton Abbey: A New Era (Universal) Just when you thought Julian Fellowes’s plummy, stately-home saga might be running out of steam, along comes a “new era”. It’s scarcely distinguishable from the old era, though the advent of the jazz age adds some oomph to the costumes, and the film hits on that age-old franchise-rejuicing tactic of sending the characters abroad, with the sunny south of France now backgrounding the usual harmless soap operatics.
Moneyboys (Mubi) Part of Mubi’s Pride Unprejudiced month selection, CB Yi’s head-turning debut centres on a young gay hustler plagued by the hostility of his rural family, who reject his sexuality even as they accept his financial assistance. It’s a fresh, culturally nuanced angle on an old story, performed and shot with vibrant energy.
