Review: ‘Pleasure’ interrogates the male gaze through a porn lens
LA TimesThe final shot of “Pleasure,” Ninja Thyberg’s bold and provocative feature about Bella Cherry, a young adult film actress navigating the porn industry, sees her in a limousine, having attained the fame she craved with none of the happiness. In the other scene, Thyberg juxtaposes Bella’s auspicious bondage experience against her later filming a rough sex scene with a male director. In it, the line between performance and reality blur toward disturbing ends as fragmented images from Bella’s point of view, deployed like shrapnel by editors Amalie Westerlin Tjellesen and Olivia Neergaard-Holm, capture the two male performers giddily laughing as they viciously attack her. But even that relationship frays when Bella reaches toward becoming a “Spiegler girl” — for one of the top adult entertainment agencies — and crosses her own moral boundaries.
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