Cinema the world over is changing. Even a hardcore commercial Hindi film like Bhool Bhulaiyaa 2 features a protagonist played with virile vibrancy by Kartik Aaryan, who is not just unconventional but borderline bizarre. Given the state of chaos everywhere eccentric heroes are easier to connect with even when she aspires to be a porn star.
For the millions across the world who think adult content, or pornography, is titillating and pleasurable, Ninja Thyberg‘s debut film Pleasure which premiered at the Cannes film festival in 2020, is revealing, in unexpected ways. The controversial film is supremely shocking and unlikely to get a public release in India where pornography is officially banned. As a matter of fact, Pleasure needs to be seen by people all over the world who think the adult-content industry is all about having sex on camera. What fun!
But what the audience finally gets to see on screen comes from a place of simulated pleasure and acute pain. The players are degraded, humiliated, abused and treated like sex toys, all with video-recorded consent, so you can’t sue. You know what you are getting into.
Viewers of this haunting startling film about kink and fame should be warned about what they are getting into.
Pleasure is a tormented document of carnal fascism. It doesn’t spare us any details of how blue films are made. The actors are embarrassingly matter-of-fact about their private parts and bodily functions which cease to be private the moment you sign on for a life as a porn star.
Into the cauldron of self-abuse falls the film’s 18-year heroine Bella, played with magnificent mojo by Sofia Kappel. When the film opens Bella has just arrived in Los Angeles from Sweden. She is ambitious and anxious to get to the top in the porn industry.
“You are so pretty. Why are you doing this?” someone asks Bella at a wild party.
This is a question that comes to our minds repeatedly. As played by newcomer Sofia Kappel in her breakthrough performance, Bella is virginally beautiful. There is an aching haunting quality to her features, as though she’s a daisy flower that would wilt under the male gaze.
And yet she chooses to be a porn star. Bella’s descent into degradation is recorded with brutal vividness. The director spares us none of the details. That a woman is at the helm of this searching exploratory treatise on the torment of backdoor success, is no surprise: only a woman can see sexual dominance for what it is.
Ninja Thyberg’s direction is so brutally candid it requires herculean efforts to keep looking on the screen as Bella goes from one pseudo-erotic expedition from another. Why is she doing this to herself? In a specially repulsive sex sequence, Bella is beaten battered and raped on camera by two men who console her after every shot that it’s just acting and will soon be over. But Bella’s trauma is not simulated like the sex is. She is genuinely traumatized, defiled, violated….So I suspect is the actress who plays Bella.
Sofia Kappel’s gutsy performance would not have worked if the directorial gaze was male. No matter how sensitive, the male gaze can never perceive sexual violation the way a woman can. The camera penetrates Bella’s self-worth robbing her entire being of dignity. It is a film about the violation on so many levels rescued from being guilty of the crime that it exposes by keeping its gaze totally free of titillation.
Pleasure is a remarkable achievement. It is at once cautionary and heartbreaking. Bella’s crossing of boundaries, trampling over personal relationships, violating her own space to be at the top of the game are utterly repugnant. But the film never allows us to judge, let alone hate, Bella. She is given the freedom to do what she wants. Even if it brings her down the knees.
The much-talked about film, The Innocents features a bunch of kids with destructive supernatural powers. This is the world of Stephen King empowered by a condition of distending naturalism where the macabre is normalized.
For those of us who have been lucky enough to see Norwegian writer-director Eskil Vogt’s debut film Blind, the blind reverence for his new film The Innocents should come as no surprise. Vogt is undoubtedly a contemporary cinematic voice to watch. He weaves in and out melancholy modern lives in Norway looking for….nothing. There is nothing to find , and the harder his characters seek the less they find.
The protagonist in Blind played by the wonderful Ellen Dorrit Petersen spent most of her time contemplating over the times when she could see, and trying to reconcile those times with her present darkness.
In, there is a deeper thrust into the darkness. Although the darkness this time is more malevolent than meditative. Four young children, two of them siblings, whose mother is played with enthralling restrain by Ellen Dorrit Petersen, get together in a seemingly normal apartment block to wreak a chilling havoc on the lives of their others after they discover they have paranormal powers.
I must confess the idea of a quartet of evil children destroying their parents’ lives did not appeal to me at all. I am sure there are many out there who would enjoy watching a 14-year old boy Ben (Sam Ashraf, wickedly fiendish) dropping a cat from the top floor, or the same Ben watching his mother die painfully of electrocution. Not my cup of tea.
But the focus of attention is not Ben but young Ida (Rakel Lenora Fløttum) a fascinating mix of beaming innocence and gleaming evil, we know something is terribly wrong with Ida’s compassion when on a drive to their new home she pinches her autistic sister hard. This is no ordinary sibling rivalry.
Writer-director Eskil Vogt treats the kids with kink’s gloves. We soon realize we are in the midst of a red-hot evil, hard to define, even harder to pinpoint and impossible to defeat. However, there is too much atmospheric build-up over more than an hour and the payoff in comparison is negligible.
The film makes very strange use of sound, such as a bowl being spun repeatedly by the autistic child, which makes the atmosphere annoyingly unsettling.
I am not too sure how the fourth child Aisha (Mina Yasmin Bremseth Asheim) who makes a strange connection with the autistic child, fits in. While this bonding yields a nurturing end result the other kids seem to belong to Stephen King’s dark evil world out in the bright sunshine of Norway prowling predatorily in chilling calm.
The Innocents is about the loss of innocence and the dominance of evil in children whom we presume to be free of guile. Little do you know, director Eskil Vogt suggests.
Speaking of eccentric heroes, try Vijay Sethupathi in the Tamil film Kaathuvaakula Rendu Kaadhal. Sethupathi plays a man who thinks he is a jinx. In a clumsy prelude, his mother starts suffering a sense of suffocation every time Rambo is around.
That’s exactly how we feel while watching this superstition-ridden romantic messy simplistic outright stupid triangle which shamelessly propagates bigamy. This must be Vijay Sethupathi’s most politically incorrect film and the first mainstream Indian film to espouse bigamy since Yash Chopra’s Daag where Rajesh Khanna lived happily ever after with both Sharmila Tagore and Raakhee Gulzar.
Good for them. In Kaathuvaakula Rendu Kaadhal which seems to have been made with the express purpose of massaging its leading man’s ego, two beautiful women Khatija (Samantha Ruth Prabhu) and Kanmani (Nayanathara) fall in love with the same man.
No prizes for guessing who that blessed man is. During the daytime Sethupathi drives cab, he romances Kanmani. Nocturnally he is a bouncer at a nightclub where he meets a spoilt rich brat’s girlfriend Khatija whom our hero Rambo starts addressing as ‘Maybe’. You see her answer to every question is a noncommittal ‘Maybe’.
Are we are supposed to laugh at this fatuous joke? Maybe….
So Ms Maybe’s possessive boyfriend mishears the bouncer and thinks he is calling Khaitija. ‘Baby’. A brawl breaks out. By then Khatija is head-over-heels in love with Rambo. So is Kanmani. Rambo loves both and doesn’t want to let go of either. When the two women confront him say, “Why should it be either or or? Why can’t I love both Rajinikanth and Kamal Haasan? Mammootty and Mohanlal?” I though Vijay’s Rambo add Nayanthara and Samantha.
Who is going to explain to this idiot that liking two movie actors is not the same as two-timing? But wait. Is it two-timing when both the women know one another and their common object of desire?
Kaathuvaakula Rendu Kaadhal is an aggressively confounding concoction. On the one hand, it champions the cause of liberal love, a la Rajneesh. On the other hand, it smothers the hero by labelling him a jinx. So we have various levels of regressiveness masquerading as ‘cool’ entertainment with three ultra-cool actors pretending they are in this for the novelty when all that matters is the zeroes on the paycheque.
Kaathuvaakula Rendu Kaadhal starts by giving us a protagonist who is sure he is a jinx to the ones he loves. Rambo is like Zeenat Aman in Satyam Shivam Sundaram without the scar on the face. He proves to be a non-jinx when two of the most beautiful actresses in Tamil cinema huddle together pretending they are okay with “sharing” one man.
Rambo is not conflicted by his double life. “I don’t want to sleep with either of you. I don’t want to marry you. I just want both around me,” he says.
Is this guy mentally retarded?
Director Vignesh Shivan, who earlier directed Vijay Sethupathi and Nayanthara in the much superior Naanum Rowdy Dhaan, has a lot to answer for.
While the above films normalize the abnormal hero, there is always the risk of losing real heroes during this excursion into edginess.
Subhash K Jha is a Patna-based film critic who has been writing about Bollywood for long enough to know the industry inside out. He tweets at @SubhashK_Jha.
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