Pleasure film review — a shockingly blunt and dispassionate view of the porn game

The Hollywood sign almost appears in the startling new drama Pleasure. Then the young woman hiking in the Los Angeles hills decides she simply has better things to do. It makes a typically trenchant moment in Ninja Thyberg’s portrait of the looking-glass twin of the American movie business: porn.

The FT podcast Hot Money is currently taking a moreish overview of the billionaires and institutions that fund the industry. Think of Pleasure as an equally compelling ground-level companion piece, with a cast of real adult performers playing versions of themselves. One has since complained that the film makes the trade “look bad”. But Thyberg’s film doesn’t smack of an agenda. Among performers paid to fake passion, it feels dispassionate.

The one actor not from porn is star Sofia Kappel, who plays that incurious hiker, Linnéa, an absolute beginner to the business and to LA, recently arrived from Sweden and soon self-renamed Bella Cherry. Her first job is prefaced by humdrum paperwork. The everyday and X-rated mix throughout the film.

It can be shockingly blunt. Thyberg stages a number of faux-porn scenes, swapping between workplace reality — the actors observed from a distance — and the kind of close-up that might actually end up online. The surprise is how traditional the story can seem underneath: an old-school drive to the top where Bella’s will to become famous first manifests in sharp elbows at porn mansions.

And yet beyond that, another curveball. Ah yes, we nod knowingly, waiting for the trauma in her past to be revealed and explain all. Only just as it seems to arrive, Bella howls with laughter at the mere idea. How banal. Think again.

Still, as one role leaves her weeping and half-broken, we ask, what is her motivation then? Thyberg is too smart for pat answers. But you do note Bella making her ascent not just with sex toys but the standard kit of modern self-promotion: endless selfies for Instagram. And is the porn industry here not a dead-on microcosm of bigger economics? Supply-side hopefuls pitch novelty and no limits; the demand is profit without complications.

Thyberg is also great at scaling theory back down to human drama. In that she has a gifted foil in Kappel, the film’s female gaze. (Though it is hard to miss on-screen that men still mostly call the shots.) Foregrounded too are the sheer, grinding physical demands of the business. It means that if Pleasure can at once recall Showgirls, The Red Shoes and the social realism of Alan Clarke, it reminds you most of all of The Wrestler: another snapshot from a world of entertainment where no one tells the bodies that none of it is real.

★★★★☆

In UK cinemas and on Mubi from June 17