Kevin Smith’s Zack and Miri Make a Porno (2008 Google Play) uses the concept of amateur porn production as the basis for a positively homespun romcom the late Lynn Shelton’s gay-panic comedy Humpday (2009 Amazon) did the same for modern bromance. Brian De Palma’s delicious Hitchcockian riff Body Double (Apple TV) playfully runs the curtain-twitching mystery of Rear Window through the seamy sexual politics of the 80s VHS porn era, with an erotic performer as its femme fatale, and the politics of voyeurism refracted several times over.
Not all porn-centred films have to be quite so serious. Larry Flynt (1996 Chili) isn’t much discussed these days, but its skewering of America’s religious right and hypocritical moral guardians is still tangy. Shifting focus from performer to pornographer, Miloš Forman’s witty, politically astute The People vs. Lovelace (2013 BFI Player), a lively biopic of the briefly celebrated Deep Throat star Linda Lovelace, shoots for the same freewheeling 70s vibe but never shakes off a sense of period cosplay, despite Amanda Seyfried’s committed performance. For a generation or two, it probably defined people’s ideas of what porn is like behind the scenes, even if the likes of Pleasure show no trace of its grimy communal warmth. Photograph: Landmark Media/Alamyīoth films are intimate surveys relative to Paul Thomas Anderson’s raunchy, writhing LA porn-star epic Boogie Nights (Amazon), which is 25 years old this year and still dazzling. 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.
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