Pleasure is about a young woman who literally sleeps her way to the top. Writer-director Ninja Thyberg chronicles a Swedish girl's journey through the porn industry, complete with simulated hardcore acts that gave distributors cold feet — A24, which initially planned to release the film in both unrated and R-rated cuts, offloaded Pleasure to Neon, which will release only the filmmaker's preferred unrated version. The film also levels industry criticisms that have left some of the real-life porn personalities in Pleasure's cast feeling "duped.".
Thyberg is clear in her intentions: Characters regularly refer to porn as "work" — and taking sex work seriously as work means understanding the ways in which porn shoots, just like the blandest Midtown offices, are defined by gendered power imbalances.
Adult performers have spoken about this. In an n+1 essay from 2019, Lorelei Lee writes about many of the same experiences that Thyberg depicts: scene partners and parameters changing without warning or consent; coercion; withheld payment.
ome of Pleasure's cast members, proud practitioners of a stigmatized profession, have disavowed the film as "a cheap shot making us look bad." Porn director Axel Braun, who in the film plays a porn director with the same name, tweeted after an industry preview screening that "we all got duped into helping [Thyberg] make a movie that would have never happened without our support.
The