Pleasure (2021)
Directed by Ninja Thyberg
Bella Cherry arrives in Los Angeles with dreams of becoming an adult film star, but she soon learns that fame won't come easy as she harnesses her ambition and cunning to rise to the top of this mesmerizing and singular world.
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11 films that influenced Pleasure
What critics say influenced Pleasure
" Boogie Nights 's pool scene and its reference to that commie flick I Am Cuba ... that's not me."
The way the actress manages to depict a stilted awkwardness on camera, a performative hyper-sexuality that continues to be broken into something unspoken and harder to shake even as the cameras roll as her career keeps rising to the next level, frequently reminded me of the same tightrope walked by Julianne Moore in Boogie Nights .
In the half-century since the “adult” film industry emerged as an above-boards legal activity, precious few legit feature films set in that world have emerged that a wider public has found edifying; the great Boogie Nights and not much else.
Vaya por delante que, pese a las apariencias, no estamos ante una oportuna fusión de Showgirls (1995) y Boogie Nights (1997) para estos tiempos de empoderamiento femenino delante y detrás de la cámara.
That, of course, is the plot of Showgirls , but it's not like Paul Verhoeven, or anyone who's written a version of Faust , ever patented the concept.
Una especie de hermana pequeña de la Nomi Malone de Showgirls, pero retratada en crudo, sin la sátira, el artificio y, sobre todo, sin la mirada masculina de Paul Verhoeven.
Vaya por delante que, pese a las apariencias, no estamos ante una oportuna fusión de Showgirls (1995) y Boogie Nights (1997) para estos tiempos de empoderamiento femenino delante y detrás de la cámara.
Linnea’s siloed existence brings to mind that Goodfellas scene in which Karen Hill observes how her social life is contained to a circle of mob wives.
Transplanting a hitherto inexperienced Kappel onto the prevailing scene and tapping its existing players — in particular Mark Spiegler, one of the biz’s biggest stars — for credible relevance, Thyberg accords her material a sense of anthropological currency that mirrors, in storyline and stylistics, Nicolas Winding Refn’s The Neon Demon; yet where the latter ended up fetishizing its thematic vacuity, Pleasure concisely dissects the layers of vapidity and fetishization that have been, by virtue of their ubiquity, internalized and naturalized by many.
A love child of the industry reflexivity we saw in Refn’s The Neon Demon and the unrepressive imagery(full frontal male nudity) of Gaspar Noé’s oeuvre, Pleasure is entirely her own and rather than pulling us down her narrative–she makes us take it.
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" Boogie Nights 's pool scene and its reference to that commie flick I Am Cuba ... that's not me."
Twenty years ago, this movie would’ve been as scandalous as Catherine Breillat’s “Romance,” and doomed to the same distribution woes, but in these ultra-pornified times it doesn’t feel transgressive so much as it does a forensic analysis of something we see all the time — less “Debbie Does Dallas” than “CSI — the Valley.”
El mundo que retrata esta película está muy lejos de aquel que aparecía en el documental de 2005 Inside Deep Throat, sobre la célebre Garganta profunda.
Twenty years ago, this movie would’ve been as scandalous as Catherine Breillat’s “Romance,” and doomed to the same distribution woes, but in these ultra-pornified times it doesn’t feel transgressive so much as it does a forensic analysis of something we see all the time — less “Debbie Does Dallas” than “CSI — the Valley.”
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Working from a script from Thyberg and co-writer Peter Modestij, Pleasure feels spiritually entwined with Magic Mike in that it’s essentially a workplace drama with an unusual setting: porn sets.
In other words, Pleasure is Wall Street in stilettos, and in Bud Fox’s role is the aforementioned Linnea, a 19-year-old Swede who has moved stateside to become Bella Cherry, her porn star nom de guerre.