Plea­sure

From its very open­ing, Plea­sure denies its view­ers dom­i­nance: the kind inher­ent to porno­graph­ic con­sump­tion, as the black screen vibrates with moans, growl­ing and affir­ma­tions of a suit­ably nasty kind. Deprived of explic­it imagery but pep­pered with sala­cious – and ulti­mate­ly banal – ​‘porn talk’, the estab­lish­ing shot hints at the provoca­tive game Swedish film­mak­er Nin­ja Thy­berg invites the audi­ence to with her fea­ture debut. Plea­sure is both sweet and sour as a com­ing of age sto­ry, fol­low­ing 19-year old Swede Lin­néa (Sofia Kap­pel) in her jour­ney to become the next big LA porn star armed with the coquet­tish pseu­do­nym ​‘Bel­la Cherry’.

While offer­ing a can­did account of sex work in the main­stream porn indus­try, the film also allows for a process of grad­ual acquain­tance. There’s an insis­tent inti­ma­cy in the way Sophie Winqvist’s inquis­i­tive cam­er­a­work probes every cor­ner; be it of the frame, or the labyrinths of con­sent. It’s the hunger for pow­er in the adult movie busi­ness in par­tic­u­lar that has fas­ci­nat­ed Thy­berg for a long time. Six years of field research and decades of read­ing fem­i­nist the­o­ry have now yield­ed this auda­cious fea­ture. With it, it seems like cin­e­ma has caught up with the mul­ti­va­lence of the debate. Thy­berg expos­es the cir­cu­la­tions of bod­i­ly cap­i­tal but does so through vari­a­tions and char­ac­ter rein­ven­tion. Most of the actors in the film are indus­try fig­ures, some of them emblem­at­ic (agent Mark Spiegler, direc­tor Aiden Starr, actor Eve­lyn Claire), with the excep­tion of its star-pro­tag­o­nist, Bella.

Sofia Kap­pel is aston­ish­ing in her act­ing debut and car­ries the role with lev­i­ty that is noth­ing short of mes­meris­ing – she moves between the timid­i­ty of ​“stage fright” and brazen self-asser­tion effort­less­ly. While these ambiva­lent moments find them­selves inter­spersed through­out the nar­ra­tive, the rhythm and pace of how it actu­al­ly unfolds only deep­ens the two oppos­ing forces gov­ern­ing Bel­la Cherry’s dri­ve: from doe-eyed ama­teur to prime hus­tler. The pow­er games are often what’s miss­ing in dis­cus­sions of sex work: that it is less about the lat­ter than the for­mer, and Kappel’s mag­net­ic per­for­mance chan­nels this hier­ar­chy in the way she locks the camera’s gaze and then makes it her own. Through tem­pered smiles, curi­ous glances, and lat­er, a porce­lain façade – Kap­pel sub­verts a role which is bound to phys­i­cal­i­ty and lets the film’s emo­tion­al under­cur­rents play out on her face.

Dis­rupt­ing famil­iar pat­terns, the film is com­mit­ted to pro­vid­ing alter­na­tive points of view and under­ap­pre­ci­at­ed cam­era angles in the desta­bil­i­sa­tion of con­ven­tion­al porn aes­thet­ics. At the lev­el of sound, Karl Frid’s score imbues many of these par­tic­u­lar scenes with sub­lime affect, weav­ing R&B beats and synths with bursts of choir singing. By replac­ing one, more earth­ly tran­scen­dence, with anoth­er, Plea­sure con­firms itself as a film that lays bare the para­dox­es of com­ply­ing to a flawed sys­tem, and cri­tiques the com­mer­cial­i­sa­tion of bod­ies with orgas­mic poeticism.