Directed and performed with limber audacity, it’s a queasy, pitch-black satire of the grooming cycle. 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. But the still-buff wastrel has no intention of leaving porn behind just yet.
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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. 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.
Largely relegating men to the background, Thyberg’s film makes its focus the community of female performers in the industry, and not cosily so. What she’s not prepared for is the mistreatment of other women required of her along the way. 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. Except that Swedish immigrant Linnéa (an extraordinary Sofia Kappel) isn’t wholly disillusioned in the process. 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. 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. Two new-to-streaming films take differing (and differently gendered) approaches to the American porn industry’s consumption of its performers. P ornography 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.