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Pleasure, a sad tale of butt 2.0 and miseries of Hollywood porn

2021-10-20T04:23:35.997Z


CRITICAL - Director Ninja Thyberg signs a first pseudo-documentary, voyeuristic and complacent about the sex industry dominated by the omnipresence of social networks.


For the past few months,

Pleasure

, the first film by Swedish Ninja Thyberg, 37, (short film turned feature film) has been taking its sulphurous fragrances from festival to festival, from Sundance to Cannes via Deauville.

It tells how a 19-year-old Swedish girl comes to Los Angeles to become a porn star.

She immediately declares to the customs officer who registers her passport that she is coming for

"pleasure"

and not for

"business"

... The tone is set.

The American dream of celebrity no longer passes through Hollywood but through the porn video industry, installed at the heart of an enveloping internet web, deployed on social networks.

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In 1996, Paul Verhoeven had shown the way with

Showgirls

, where Elizabeth Berkley played a heroine, without family or friends, appearing in Las Vegas with the firm intention of becoming a dancer ... before ending up spinning lasciviously around a bar of pole dance at the Sheetah bar under the direction of Kyle MacLachlan. If Verhoeven filmed with the ferocity that we know him the world of striptease, where bad taste disputes it with squeaky satire, here none of that.

In

Pleasure

, the heroine (Sofia Kappel, the only actress not belonging to the porn industry) begins by being called Bella Cherry. With a touch of cynicism and unwavering determination, she's putting the odds in her favor. This is also reminiscent of Paul Thomas Anderson's film

Boogie Nights

(1998) where Mark Wahlberg played a young man terribly well endowed by nature, and who changed his name to Dirk Diggler to start a career in porn at the end of the 1970s. Full of humor, tragicomic, the film was intended to be a painting of the VHS porn scene in these last days of glory, a sort of rise and fall of a porn star (in this case John Holmes), but filmed without the slightest eroticism or voyeurism.

With

Pleasure,

on the other hand, the heroine voluntarily throws herself into the mire, as she would dive into the "King size" swimming pool of a Californian villa. Bella Cherry is anything but an innocent victim. She learns quickly and daringly navigates within this environment whose perversity is natural. We will not know anything about her Swedish past, except when she telephones her mother who asks her to return home.

The provocative photoshoots, the grueling chain shoots, the obsessive hygiene of pornstars, drugs, “pajama parties” at crooked producers, nothing is spared the spectator. The minimalist staging, with almost documentary coldness, disconcerting, allows to unintentionally reveal the ugliness of this small macho universe, patriarchal and self-satisfied.

Voyeuristic, even complacent, Ninja Thyberg's camera follows the resistible rise of her heroine without any critical hindsight. This bikini-clad Rocky takes on her role head-to-head, suffers more and more, but returns to the ring and triumphs by sinking into the abject. This fairy tale 2.0. gradually turns into a series of more violent and humiliating events each time, and it becomes obvious: without even being aware of it,

Pleasure

is actually a horror film that does not speak its name. All in a world of garish colors, blood red, electric blue, candy pink ...

Domination, torture, humiliation are the daily life of this “success story”. Bella Cherry is assaulted by two actors who believe her to be consenting. Is she complaining? No, she simply changes agents ... At the end of her takes, she posts on Instagram or the equivalent of pictures of her smeared, defeated, while making mines and the "V" for victory. She thus wins "Followers", "Blue thumb" and other "Like".

We remember that in

Neon Demon

(2016), the Dane Nicolas Winding Refn plunged Elle Fanning into an ultra-classic story, that of a young girl recently arrived from her province attracted by the model and who drowned in the vapors of the celebrity.

But at least the director of

Drive

added his sulphurous, vampiric and nightmarish vision to it.

In

Pleasure

, even under the guise of sociological study of a specific environment, no vision crosses the hallucinating trajectory of this young Swedish girl who dreams of being a porn star. That's the drama ...

Source: lefigaro

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