Streaming: the best films about the porn industry

[softball]

Complex, candid porn drama Pleasure and pitch-black sex-business satire Red Rocket follow in the writhing wake of Boogie Nights et al

e Nights et al

Guy Lodge
Guy Lodge
Sat 18 Jun 2022 08.00 BST
25
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.

Suzanna Son and Simon Rex in Red Rocket.
Suzanna Son and Simon Rex in Red Rocket. Photograph: Landmark Media/Alamy
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.

The Wayward Cloud
‘Gloriously eccentric’: The Wayward Cloud (2004).
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.

[gonzo]

Originally Posted by softball

Complex, candid porn drama Pleasure and pitch-black sex-business satire Red Rocket follow in the writhing wake of Boogie Nights et al

e Nights et al

Guy Lodge
Guy Lodge
Sat 18 Jun 2022 08.00 BST
25
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.

Suzanna Son and Simon Rex in Red Rocket.
Suzanna Son and Simon Rex in Red Rocket. Photograph: Landmark Media/Alamy
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.

The Wayward Cloud
‘Gloriously eccentric’: The Wayward Cloud (2004).
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.

These all sound much different than the Hugh Hefner documentary made just before his death. The new one wasnt much better but in the other direction from what Ive been told.