Pleasure - 2022
Look up the word “unflinching,” and this is the picture you will find.
Pleasure has left me far more devastated than the porn-adjacent Red Rocket from last year. It’s not perfect. Its lead is a little wooden and cryptic (though perhaps she plays this to a strength). We’ve seen this arc and journey before. But we’ve NEVER witnessed the subtle layers of degradation generally born of the micro-aggressions of males standing on the razor thin line of coercion and consent quite like this.
We certainly have not seen this industry presented in such a forensic and punctilious manner either. It’s actually a bit of a miracle, a peculiar kind of genius. Bringing real adult world managers and “talent” to the scene and just letting them “do what they do” yields powerful results. For one, it shows the care and bureaucratic red tape, the forms and safe words, on-set coordinators and more that it takes to pull these videos off in today’s landscape. But, Pleasure is also nearly seditious in how it exposes the dehumanizing and misogynistic behavior of these folks simply by staging scenes and letting them skewer themselves.
So, it’s an interesting admixture in the end. A film that’s pretty pedestrian with its lead’s range, even as the physical nature of her performance and facial acting is quite powerful. One whose narrative beats retread old ground. But, Ninja Thyberg’s work nonetheless contains flashes of brilliance, not in its depiction of adult film industry workers as abusive and demented, but precisely in demonstrating what havoc the purportedly well-intentioned can wreak on the human spirit.
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