This film may not be straight out pornography but it sure looks like it. It is a film, an art film even as it has received the cachet of being shown at international film festivals, that is about the pornography industry itself. As such it has plenty of scenes that could be in porn but it shies short of actually depicting any sex. The film does depict the unsavory aspects of the industry but at the same time it actually makes it look like the industry isn’t that different from any other. Unfortunately I don’t think it’s all that good a film as it struggles with the characterization of its protagonist.

A young Swedish girl Linnéa arrives in Los Angeles intent on becoming the great porn star. She has arranged to be represented by an agent and stays in a so-called model house shared with other performers. Her first experience goes well enough as everyone is completely professional and follows the rules. She tries to maintain a distance with her housemates at first but eventually bonds with them and they teach her how to build her brand. This doesn’t satisfy her however and after she spots a so-called Spiegler girl, represented by one of the most successful managers Mark Spiegler in the business, she decides to be one of them. In order to do so however, she must be prepared to do more extreme scenes including those involving beatings and coercion. When one particularly rough scene leaves her feeling violated, she is unable to complete the shot and ends her relationship with her manager, accusing him of not doing more to protect her. She considers giving up and returning home but ends up doubling down and try harder instead.

There’s plenty of nudity and sexual scenes in this film and even if it stops short of showing genitals or real sex, some of the actions depicted are hardcore and hurtful enough to make for uncomfortable watching. This is of course the intent and as expected serves to highlight the issue of how harmful such extreme forms of porn might be even if it were made with the consent of everyone involved. Yet this doesn’t seem to be the film’s focus to me. Instead it shows the porn industry to be pretty much an industry like any other and a porn performer’s job to be a job like any other. The template for this film follows that of any biography film of elite sportsmen, musicians and similar top performers. How they struggle to achieve success, how much adversity they face, how much of themselves they have to sacrifice along the way and how in the end they reach the very top through sheer determination. This is precisely the path that Linnéa charts here and this is how this film really feels bold to me: the normalization of the porn industry as something that is not so different or any less deserving of respect to any other entertainment field.

Unfortunately this still isn’t really a good film. While the job of a porn actress may not be that different after all from any other job, it still seems like an unusual career as a first choice for a young girl. I do like that when she first arrives in Los Angeles, someone asks her why she is doing this, she starts to tell a story about how she was raped by her father and then both of them laugh at it as being a tired cliché. But then we never get to revisit her true motivations either. It would be understandable if she did it for money and the lifestyle wealth can bring, but she doesn’t really seem to revel in that either. In an interview, she claims that she wants to be a porn star and to have a large audience watching her, but she doesn’t seem like a natural exhibitionist or even have a very extroverted personality. I attribute this to muddled thinking on the part of the director and writer Ninja Thyberg. She knows the direction she wants the character to go but I don’t think she can fully articulate how she gets there.

I understand this film grew from a successful short film with the same title and that short film is more pointedly about the harm that the porn industry inflicts. The messaging in this feature-length film is more ambiguous. Linnéa herself doesn’t seem to be a good place due to her choices, but her former housemates make less extreme choices as part of their porn careers and seem happy enough. Finally I note that this is a fictional story and porn stars now are so mainstream that their life stories are no longer exceptional. Plus it even ignores how the porn industry in the US is moving beyond studio productions and headed towards self-directed amateur work. As a result, this depiction even feels out of date in today’s society.