I read the synopsis of this film in an in-flight entertainment magazine and I thought it was the most interesting thing. So I played the film and caught a glimpse of a steamy sex scene, and of course, being on a plane with stewardesses and other passengers being able to see directly at my screen, I turned it off. Ain't no way people are going to think I was watching porn on a plane. So I watched it last night at midnight on my laptop, where the only judging eyes were my teddy bears, and, well, God.
Let's get to it:
Spoiler Alert.
The film, set in the 70's, tells the true story of 21 year-old Linda Lovelace (Amanda Seyfried) who lives a life of curfews and strict parents due to her recent unwanted pregnancy. She gets wooed by Chuck Traynor (Peter Sarsgaard) and eventually marries and lives with him. Their marriage becomes rocky as Chuck starts to control and abuse Linda into pornography, and later on let his friends rape her in a gangbang. Linda rises to fame when she did an enormously successful hardcore porn film entitled Deep Throat, where she stars as a woman with a clit at the back of her throat. The real Linda actually did invent the act of deepthroating. Told in a non-linear narrative, the story ends a few years later, with Linda speaking out against pornography and domestic abuse.
Linda Lovelace was a transient pornographic actress, and later on revealed her true story in her 1980 autobiography, Ordeal. What I loved about this film was the untold story of a pornographic actress, and how human they were. Porn stars now are seen as objects and heartless women. They don't have a personality but just personalitits. Stars like Sasha Grey, Miyabi, Asa Akira, or Jenna Jameson; nobody ever talks about their lives before they entered the industry. For all we know, they were baby porn stars. I couldn't see them as women but only tools for pleasure. They might as well be walking blow up dolls.
But this film made me realize that each one of these people had lives before porn. They had a family, a boyfriend, friends, heartbreak, crushes, self-esteem issues. They all have experienced things I couldn't even imagine. They're not just the sum of their X-rated films because they're much more than what they do for a living. I remember watching an interview with Miyabi (Maria Ozawa) who said that she would never sleep with a man on the first date. The interviewer was slightly taken aback and asked why, and she explained how porn sex is just that; fucking. While sex with a man in the solace of her bedroom is making love, it's intimate and private, and those are two different things. She understood that the no-sex-on-the-first-date rule sounded a bit odd for a porn star, but I realized that most porn stars actually do treat on-screen fucking and intimate sex as two completely different things.
I had a brief obsession with the lives of porn stars at one point. I watched interviews, I read about their upbringing, and I tried to piece their personalities together. I wanted to see them as more than dirty-talking porn stars but as women, but to no avail. Even their interviews were steamy and full of double entendres.
But this movie...whoa. It's real and heartwarming. It made me feel for her as a human being as opposed to just a porn star. You'd think that raping a porn star is no big deal because hey, they fuck for a living! But it is so not right, it's just despicable. These men treated her like a walking vagina. She was nothing more than a tool for great fellatio and a hole to screw, and honestly, how many times have you seen a porn star and treated her exactly the same way?
In one scene, where Linda was running away from Chuck and fell on the gravel and hit her head, the police came rushing in, thinking it was another form of domestic violence. But when the officers recognized her battered face, they told Chuck to take her home, and one of them asked for her autograph. That was the turning point for her. She realized she was nothing more than tits on a screen and she was treated less of a human being simply because of her profession. It was a moment of heartbreak for me too, because I realized that I used to see porn stars the same way.
Both Amanda Seyfriend and Peter Sarsgaard played their roles perfectly. I've always thought Peter Sarsgaard was extremely charming in a creepy and domineering way, like in An Education. Amanda was great, too. Both did a swell job and I couldn't really pick on them because they neither exceeded my expectations nor fell short of it. They were great performers who acted the part they way it should be.
This wasn't an oh-my-god film and it's not Oscar-worthy or anything. But it did make me open my eyes to the pornography industry and the mistreatment of women. Because of that, I give this movie extra points, so a 7/10 will suffice. I love films that make me change the way I see things and people. If I get emotionally attached to a film and walk out of the cinema with a change of heart, then it's pretty good in my book.
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