If you had to say what the biggest difference is between the porn industry of the 1970s and the porn industry of today, you’d probably start with the obvious and overwhelming fact that people used to watch porn in grungy movie theaters and now access it on the Internet.
That’s easy to believe, since “Pleasure” has the clinical look and feel of a documentary pegged to the frame of a fictionalized story. It’s a coldly artful and explicit piece of anthropological voyeurism, and its subject is what pornography has become — what it is, what it’s selling, why the people who perform in it are drawn to it, what it does for them, what it doesthem, and what it’s doing to all of us.
The film is quite raw, full of casual shots of erections , but except for an early scene of Linnéa shaving herself in the shower, there isn’t a single image of female genitalia. That’s Thyberg’s way of undercutting the male gaze, of keeping the film hewed to Linnéa’s point-of-view. On the porn sets, she’s confronted by men who are paid to act, to one degree or another, like angry horndog masters .
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