Lovelace.

Truth is certainly stranger than fiction in this biopic about Linda Susan Boreman, or as the world knows her porn star Linda Lovelace, the woman who is attributed with kick starting the American adult film industry with the high earning porn film Deep Throat (1972). Deep Throat was about a sexually frustrated woman played by 'Lovelace' who finds it imposable to achieve an orgasm. When she visits a sex therapist it's discovered that her clitoris is located in her throat! I'll leave the rest to your imagination; although the 61-minute film was intended to be a sex comedy the great majority of it audience weren't there for the laughs!

 

Amada Seyfried and Linda Lovelace.

Linda with her husband Chuck Traynor.

Jointly directed by Rob Epstein and Jeffery Friedman, a pair better known for documentaries than feature films, Lovelace (2013) is a gripping portrait of a young women and the 1970’s porn industry in America. It tells Linda’s story in two ways. I think the viewer must except that it is probable not the whole truth and nothing but the truth but once you get that out of the way there' s nothing stopping you from excepting Linda's general plight at the hands of her husband, manager and pimp, the sleazy Chuck Traynor (Peter Sarsgaad) as told in the second part of the film after she had rejected the skin trade, remarried as Linda Marchiano and after a polygraph, wrote her memoirs as a sort of liberating exercise revealing how she was beaten, raped and abused by the men involved in this money making business. The first version of the story at the beginning of the movie is a far more romantic account that for me was not really necessary showing how Linda eagerly entered the door to the sex industry being held open by the every encouraging Traynor.

 

Not everyone was happy about the release of Deep Throat!

A splendid cast lead by Amanda Seyfried as the naive young women exploited for money who eventually becomes a campaigner against the lucrative sex industry and a feminist campaigner against all types of domestic abuse even the mental abuse she was subjected to by her staunchly Catholic mother (an unrecognisable Sharon Stone) This is what the film is really trying emphasise, the abuse of woman, admittedly this is the 'rough' end but no less demeaning, as critic Peter Bradshaw pointed out in his review when he compares the treatment of ‘Lovelace’ with that of Tippi Hedren by Hitchcock or Joe DiMaggio's abuse against his wife Marilyn Monroe.