Pleasure (2022)

Pleasure follows a young woman who moves to LA or pursue a career in porn. The film starts by focusing on her ambition and agency in seeking out opportunities while also finding some community. But as the film goes on it depicts just how much the system is set up not to allow her to find success but to be used up and spit out. It is powerful in how it lures us into its appeal before slowly transforming our experience into something shocking, not shocking in its graphic nature but in its frankness about the female experience of making porn.

While no experience is universal, and there is more porn made by women for women, or made by film makers who queer the industry in ways that empower the unempowered, Pleasure focuses on the more mainstream industry and the ways it presents as being sex positive while also using its participants, especially the women, and disposing of them. 

The film is graphic, showing everything from erections to semen to depictions of BDSM that we are not used to seeing outside of actual porn, yet the film never sexualizes these images. Pleasure manages to make it all feel clinical and never arousing. We understand both Cherry’s desire to be in the business and her ambition as well as her fear and regret as she makes choices she doesn’t want to or is put further and further into situations that are not her choice. 

The film focuses on a specific experience of making porn and doesn’t speak for everything in he industry however what it does it does well and Sophia Kappel’s performance is both brave and moving. Pleasure was hard to watch as the scenes moved from being more mundane to more abusive. Yet director Thyberg never lets you turn away until she finally lets her subject make her escape.

Pleasure

Starring: Sophia Kappel, Revika Anne Reustle, Chris Cock, Lance Hart, Axel Braun, Aiden Starr, Mick Blue, Steve Holmes, Mark Spiegler  

Director: Ninja Thyberg

Writers: Peter Modestij, Ninja Thyberg