Larry Oliver Film Reviews

  Contains spoilers Pleasure , directed by Ninja Thyberg from a screenplay she co-wrote with Peter Modestij, is not a film to be watched on one’s home computer. Freeze at least forty per cent of the scenes and it will look like you are watching pornography, as opposed to an objective film made about the Los Angeles porn industry. Nineteen-year-old Swede, Linnéa (Sofia Kappel) rebrands herself as Bella Cherry as she attempts to be the biggest star in hard porn, specifically a Spiegler girl, working for the top agency. Governed by consent forms, Linnéa finds herself in a cruel industry. You can suffer or mete cruelty out.     It is not a dream you can share with your friends or your family – Linnéa tells her mother she has undertaken an internship. It requires immense confidence and self-possession as well as a willingness to participate in degrading acts. You make new friends, girls who eat pizza and watch Game of Thrones - the film was shot in 2019. You recognise you...

  In her 2013 debut feature, The Reunion , Swedish performer-director Anna Odell showed herself being ejected from a class reunion after describing the humiliation she suffered whilst at school, then deconstructed the spectacle by having actors play the bullies who nourished her waking unhappiness. Rooted in the director’s emotional pain, the film earned Odell five star reviews and the right to make a second feature. X & Y , which opened the 2018 Stockholm International Film Festival, is that movie. It is similarly provocative, this time pairing the troubled director with the well-known Swedish actor, Mikael Persbrandt, who has had his own experience of substance abuse. I’m not sure why cocaine addiction is called ‘substance abuse’, unless you waste the stuff. Personally, I don’t advocate drug taking – why walk with a crutch if your leg isn’t broken? I won’t even take beta blockers even though my cardiologist recommends it. With two troubled people playing off one another, yo...

  T he Heart ( Hjãrte t), the debut feature from Swedish thirty-year old writer-director-actress Fanni Metelius, begins with a conversation that many of us have had during our lifetime, though hopefully only once: do you masturbate? Mika (Metelius) doesn’t believe in pleasuring herself, which is to say she is wearing a ‘situation vacant’ sign around her neck. Listening in is Tesfay (Ahmed Berhan), a fellow student – she’s into photography, he into music production. He complements her on the music on her personal music player – the only decent music played at the party they both attended, apparently. Mika is attracted to him. He’s tall, of African descent, has tattoos and fixes her with a stare that is difficult to read. You sense that Mika is not like any women he has known to this point. They probably wouldn’t allow a man to join in a conversation about masturbation. To be fair, he doesn’t offer a confession about his own self-pleasuring habits. You wouldn’t in mixed company. In a...