I cannot enjoy professional pornography with the sound on.  The theatrical moans, shrieks, and dirty talk of pro-level pornography are more than a turn-off; they’re painfully grating.  Is that too personal of a confession for an amateur movie review?  Either way, it’s the exact kind of uncomfortable intimacy you endure while watching the porn industry drama Pleasure in public.  The opening credits play over harsh layers of pro-porno moans & dialogue, crewmembers’ names populating on a black screen in plain text.  It sent a familiar shiver up my spine that I could not shake at the theater, since my usual exit strategy is muting my laptop.  Pleasure is all about staring down the least comfortable aspects of professional porn production, from the grotesque theatricality of the finished product to the on-set exploitations consumers willfully overlook in order to enjoy it.  It’s not the best drama I’ve seen on the big screen this year, but it is the most effectively & universally unsettling.

Sofia Kappel stars as the aspiring pornstar Bella Cherry, who emigrates from Sweden to Los Angeles in search of instant, XXX-rated fame.  She succeeds in her mission, quickly graduating from OnlyFans solo shoots in an overpopulated camgirl hypehouse to decadent pro shoots in gaudy, overlit McMansions.  Her ascent is neither fun nor easy.  Cherry experiences exactly one wholly positive shoot in her short career.  Most of her workdays are plagued by boundary-crossing opportunists who weaponize the language of consent & girl-power politics to pressure her into sex acts she is not comfortable with.  She is alienated from fellow performers at every turn, finding little comradery among peers.  Worse yet, her horrific on-set experiences serve as impromptu training courses that guide her own professional behavior, so that she quickly ends up violating the boundaries of other cloutless actresses in the exact same way.  It’s not so much a rise-to-power story as it is a story of moral corruption & physical violation.

Pleasure works best as a sensationalist version of Kitty Green’s The Assistant, or maybe Lizzie Borden’s Working Girls: a scathing look at the abuses, exploitation, and monotonies of all daily labor, told through the microcosm of a niche, especially charged work environment.  Its only setback is that it’s a little too eager to get its political points across in very clear moral & physical violations of its workers’ boundaries, often at the expense of fleshing out their internal lives.  Director Ninja Thyberg describes herself as a former anti-porn activist who’s warmed up to the feminist potential of the medium.  She approaches the L.A. porn industry with harsh the skepticism of an academic outsider.  Even if individual production companies within that industry come out looking okay (mostly just Kink.com), there’s no way to view her ultimate assessment of the industry as positive, or even neutral.  It’s specifically about structural & professional abuse of entry-level workers. Thyberg never feels like she’s condemning pornography as an artform or as a personal choice of profession, though, so her criticisms tend to target the big-picture exploitation of pro-porno’s capitalist sensibilities, which are directly relatable to pretty much any modern work environment, no matter how clothed.  It’s not anti-porn so much as it’s anti-capitalism, which is likely the journey Thyberg’s activism has taken in her personal ideology.

If Pleasure were a character study of Bella Cherry as an exceptional example within her trade, it might have been a more emotionally devastating drama.  Instead, Cherry is more of a symbol than an individual, so the movie is more about her environment than it is about her.  Still, Thyberg makes Cherry’s journey incredibly tense from scene to scene.  She effectively reverses the default POV of POV porn, showing the grotesque close-up details a typical actress would observe in her daily toils – mostly men’s feet, chins, and balls as Cherry shifts through various choreographed positions.  Choral chanting worthy of The Omen overwhelms the soundtrack throughout Cherry’s monstrous, monotonous workdays.  The most uncomfortable details are the weaponized catchphrases of consent, though, as men say things like “No pressure” and “You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do” while clearly communicating the exact opposite message.  There were some early giggles in my audience at the movie’s unrelenting vulgarity (especially during the opening credits), but those sounds gradually drained from the room as Cherry wandered deeper into the pro-porno labyrinth.  We all left the theater in a chilled silence, which I suppose means Thyberg’s mission was accomplished just as efficiently as Cherry’s.

-Brandon Ledet

Vortex is, by default, the most emotional Gaspar Noe film.  The eternally juvenile director usually only needles his audience for a single emotional response (shock), but his latest is unusually vulnerable & sentimental.  It’s still not an easy sit.  Euro art cinema veterans Dario Argento & Françoise Lebrun play an aging couple with rapidly declining health, suffering from heart attacks and dementia, respectfully.  Alex Lutz plays their frustrated adult son who is helpless to ease their suffering, both because of the inevitability of death and because of the day-to-day complications of his own life as a drug addict and a recently divorced father.  It’s a miserable display, but Noe doesn’t dwell on his characters’ pain & suffering the way you might expect him to.  There’s a sweetness & warmth to the doomed trio’s unstable life together that you won’t find in previous Noe films.  Climax felt like a career-high watermark for what his usual style can achieve, so it’s for the best that he followed it up with something new, something newly subdued.

Of course, Vortex would not be a Gaspar Noe film without a flashy visual device for the director to brandish for his audience’s awe & exhaustion.  In this case, he bifurcates the frame into De Palma-style split screens for the entirety of the runtime, isolating the geriatric husband & wife in two separate, cramped 4:3 boxes.  Like with all Noe films, you’ll either find the split-screen visuals to be a distracting gimmick or a stunning visual translation of the themes, depending on your generosity towards his intent.  There are moments when the choice feels purely arbitrary, like when Argento sits opposite Lebrun at their breakfast table, his arms stretching impossibly long across the screen like Mister Fantastic to comfort her.  Often enough, though, it feels like a genuine meditation on the way two people can live entirely separate, lonely lives in a shared space, something many long-term married people can relate to whether or not they’re nearing hospice.  Although the split-screen framing provides a rigid structure for the picture from nearly start to end, Noe does keep the moment-to-moment action fresh by having the three main characters swap frames whenever they’re in close proximity. It’s a kind of Choose Your Own Adventure experience where the whims & attentions of the audience dictate the shape of the movie they’re watching.  Noe also maintains his deafening sound mixing (this time applied to pedestrian noises like typewriter thuds, coffee percolators, heavy breathing, and urination instead of the usual sex & drugs & rock ‘n’ roll hedonism) and his thoughtful opening credits artwork (this time including contributors’ years of birth along with their names) to make his auteurist throughlines unmistakable even as his themes & subjects soften.

Conceived after he survived a near-fatal brain hemorrhage in 2020, it’s clear Noe’s pondering his own mortality here, along with the universal, devastating inevitability of declining health.  Watching an elderly couple strain to prop each other up as their hearts & brains wear out is a vivid enough reflection of that existential crisis, but I got the sense that the failings of the human body is not all that’s bothering Noe.  I’m not even sure it was his main concern.  He seems to be much more fixated on his characters’ connection to clutter & physical media than their connection to their physical bodies.  Argento plays an author & film critic, Lebrun a psychiatrist.  Their home is overflowing with books, movies, knickknacks, photographs, and other assorted junk – all evidence of a long life lived.  They’re often less concerned with suffering or dying than they are with being separated from their stuff, an anxiety that Noe grapples with sincerely & severely.  Even the shops near their apartment—groceries pharmacies, book stores, etc.—are cozy spaces cluttered with long-lingering objects from an old world that will vanish as soon as the people guarding over them expire.  Vortex is light on dialogue but never feels quiet, as the spaces it weaves through are impossibly noisy in their collections of cherished, worthless objects. 

If you want an excruciating nightmare about the practical, gradual ravages of dementia, Haneke has you covered in Amour.  If you want a heartfelt sensory immersion in the daily experience of the affliction, you already have The Father.  Vortex rests somewhere between those two distinctions, both brutally frank about the ugliness of a failing body and warmly sentimental about the loneliness & confusion of old age.  This might be a for-fans-only proposition as a result, as it’s more interesting as an evolution in Noe’s career (and the career of fellow director Dario Argento, who has never acted in a leading role before) than it is a contribution to the dementia drama as a genre.  It worked remarkably well for me in that context, even as someone who despised both Amour and most of Noe’s early provocations.  It also reminded me to clear the clutter in my home every few years going forward, so no one will have to deal with my dusty comic books & thrift store DVDs after I die.

-Brandon Ledet