Pleasure (2021)

Sofia Kappel, some performance!

As for <em>'Pleasure'</em> as a whole, quite striking! They did a fantastic job at making every scene, particularly the porn set scenes, feel incredibly real - it feels documentary-esque at a fair few points. It's an erotic drama and, well, a genre has seldom been so apt. It portrays the porn industry in an unfortunately believable and uncomfortable way. I felt uneasy for the majority, but that's very much the intention.

No doubt these type of films aren't to a lot of people's taste, but if they are - I'd recommend this 2021 release.

The ambitious “Bella” (Sofia Kappel) arrives from Sweden in Los Angeles determined to make a successful career from the porn industry. She’s not an unattractive lass, nor is she entirely inexperienced, but here in the capital of global media sex, she struggles to make much of an impact. Not only are her looks nothing particularly special, but she also finds that despite some sagely advice from both “Mike” (Jason Toler) and from “Bear” (Chris Cock) she is soon facing hostility and competition from many of the women around her. It seems that the vanilla isn’t going to cut it, so she is going to have to turn to more extreme forms of “entertainment” - and that isn’t going to be anything like the walk in the park it ends up looking like to the punters on the screen. Is she really ready? This could have made for quite an interesting, insider’s look, at the American porn industry but to be honest I quickly became bored with it. It seems to vacillate between an authentic critique of what “Bella” is prepared to do for her art and a stereotypical perspective on a seedy industry run by old, fat and bald men indulging in some sexploitation. I suspect that there are elements of both in this cutthroat and uncompromising industry - straight or gay - but this didn’t really inform. More, it offered us a single woman’s over-dramatised perspective that seemed contrived to deliver a predictable concluding scenario that I felt was pretty obvious from about ten minutes in. At times it just comes across as a faux-documentary with plenty of grudges and though nobody could accuse Kappel of giving half-measures, I didn’t feel I knew anything about what really drove her to push her body and her mind so determinedly. In some ways, this depicts porn as something she simply isn’t suited for - but, frankly, who would be? Repetitious and disappointing, sorry.