This short but effective documentary follows a former porn star as she investigates how free pornography sites online are doing more than just killing her former profession.
Ovidie appeared in pornographic films for well over a decade. While not a pornographic film per se, I did recognize her from the 2001 French film "The Pornographer," where she did hardcore material onscreen in an otherwise okay fictional look at a former porn film maker in decline. Ovidie is now on a crusade, looking into how and why pornography has gone from a physical medium that could be viewed in the privacy of your own home (or murky theaters) to a multi-billion dollar business that caters to a humanity that only needs their smart phones and internet service. What she finds is a subculture of desperation. Young women are selling their bodies, and risking both disease and actual physical damage due to a demand for rougher and more harmful sexual acts in order to one up the competition. Behind the scenes, the women are not "empowered" by their appearances online, as hundreds of millions of dollars are being bounced around the world in a giant money laundering scheme, with some performers not even being paid for their "services."
While Ovidie proceeds through her investigation, following the money, I was never sure how she wanted things to turn out. Did she miss her glory days in front of the camera, or was she an anti-porn activist altogether? Watching what some of these young women go through was tough, shattering the illusion that they were raking in tons of money and living the high life. As of this writing, most of the footage is close to five years old, and I hope the people here are no longer in the industry since a career in this business is very short. When you view porn online, or in any form, you're feeding a giant shady corporate monster. You may not be paying any money on a free site, but that view and traffic you trigger is then bought and sold, and the beast runs on those hits and eventual memberships on other sites. Women from poor countries are debasing themselves for the watching pleasure of men, who ask them to do the most horrendous things imaginable onscreen, including sexual acts that they never have done before in the privacy of a monogamous relationship. We learn one Chinese live webcam model literally ingests human waste if the customer wants her to, and still may not make any money for an eight or ten hour day of work. These women are being trafficked, but not on the streets. They live in a fantasy facade (the webcam house in Romania is gross), with handlers at the ready to cater to their sense of importance before they come to their senses, or get too old, and are released back into the real world to have a normal life again. One model talks about opening a business, and starting a family, and it's sad to think her future children might stumble upon this someday. Another woman has five siblings at home, her mother is a cook, and she has only laid eyes on her father once in her life...the thought that he might someday be watching his own flesh and blood humiliate themselves like this is creepy.
If you are a purveyor of pornography, wondering "what harm can it do?," then Ovidie's documentary is the answer. She doesn't even go into how viewing this can have a detrimental effect on the patron's relationships, but that is a conclusion you can draw on your own. Turn off your screens, and think for yourself. When you punch up a streaming site or look at the latest "hacked" pics of your favorite celebrity, you are damaging more lives than just your own. I used to review older adult films like I would regular films, and always marvelled at a lot of the cast's early deaths through suicide and drug overdoses. Maybe it's time we stop contributing to this industry and let it die out? Just a suggestion. This is a slightly flawed but still powerful documentary.
Stats:
-Directed by Ovidie
-Cast: Ovidie, Roy Klabin, Nate Glass, Gregory Dorcel, Arwen Gold, Lars-Marten Nagel, Mike South
-Media: Streaming on Amazon Prime
-Running Time: 77 minutes
-Letterboxd rating: (* * * */* * * * *); IMDb rating: 8/10
-Not Rated, contains female nudity, sexual content, very strong sexual references, very strong adult situations, tobacco use
