6/3/2023 0 Comments Gay rape xxx movingimages![]() looking for fame, briefly ascending to stardom, and then being eaten alive by the industry. Pleasure has very few antecedents as far as explicit films about the manufacture of pornography are concerned, but it does fit into a long line of movies about young women traveling to L.A. “You think I’m going to pay for half a scene? Everything you just did was for nothing.” Linnéa, it would seem, is a honey and a tough girl and a rising star with agency right up until the moment her decisions start to cost her superiors money, at which point she reverts back to being a commodity. “You want to finish, don’t you?” When Linnéa does not, gentle encouragement turns swiftly to disgust: “You’re fucking with everyone else’s money,” the director snarls. “It’s just a show, and you’re a tough girl, right?” “You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do,” another adds. “Are you okay, honey?” one performer asks. ![]() ![]() The first time she begs off, eyeliner dripping down her cheeks, she is met with coos and sweetness. “I feel like that’s all just part of stage fright, and so you just have to overcome it and push past it,” her first director informs her when she’s struggling to do the scene, adding airily but entirely unconvincingly, “No pressure.”Ībout halfway through the film, emboldened by an experience doing a rough scene with a female, feminist porn auteur, she agrees to do a gangbang she imagines will be similarly choreographed instead, it turns into a situation she will later describe as a rape, not quite nonconsensual but not fully consensual, either. Men who work with Linnéa, whether co-stars or directors, often employ the same wheedling brand of faux-feminist coaxing to convince her to go through with acts she might otherwise not. She moves into an unpretty model home with a small band of other female porn stars, one of whom-a mouthy, thick-skinned firebrand named Joy-fast becomes her closest friend, though they will eventually, inevitably become professional rivals. Renaming herself “Bella Cherry,” Linnéa throws herself immediately into performing, doing her first scene with a paunchy middle-aged man and then delightedly Instagramming a picture of her face covered in semen. “I did sex work for the same reason I had always done wage labor: because I needed the money.” The most provocative reason Thyberg could have given for Linnéa’s career, in other words, is the un-thrilling one almost everybody has for going to work: to pay the bills, to secure housing, and to live. making porn, before laughing and suggesting that she’s actually out there because Swedes “just suck.” Her unwillingness to offer up a serious response reminded me of an essay by the brilliant writer and adult performer Lorelei Lee, in which they argue that doing sex work is “as good and as terrible as other, lower-wage work.” “I knew the work was not how anti-sex-work feminists described it,” Lee suggests. “Like, seriously, my dad raped me when I was young,” she tells her minder when he asks why she’s in L.A. Linnéa is a gorgeous blank, physically interchangeable with hundreds of her bare and barely legal equivalents, and opaque enough that anybody watching her might find it easy to convince themselves that she is doing what she does for fun. Thyberg’s film appears to be as disinterested in exploring its principal character’s motivations as she is in expressing them to her peers, her co-stars, or her management. Linnéa (Sofia Kappel), a 19-year-old from Sweden, has arrived in Los Angeles with the goal of making it in two distinct but overlapping senses of the phrase her face, which has a babyish, Chloë Grace Moretz quality that suggests she might be perfect casting for an adult spoof of Clouds of Sils Maria, betrays no hint of anything but boredom when she answers “pleasure.” It’s a funny, caustic opener for a movie that defies its title: Pleasure, which has struggled to achieve release since its Sundance debut in 2021 due to its thoroughly graphic nature, is all business, and its forthright sexual scenes are not technically pornographic in the sense that nobody entirely sane would find them pleasurable to masturbate to. “Business or pleasure?”, a petite and perky blonde is asked at airport customs, in the first scene of Ninja Thyberg’s new film about the porn industry. Ninja Thyberg, Sweden/Netherlands/France, NEON
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