Such was the controversial life of Linda Boreman, AKA Linda Lovelace, the acceptable face of 70s porno chic, that the most recent frontrunner for the role was another troubled alliterative star, Lindsay Lohan. To the uninitiated, Lovelace became briefly notorious as the star of the 1972 breakout adult movie Deep Throat, in which she played a woman whose clitoris, for reasons never really explained by her bubble-blowing "doctor", was located near her larynx, meaning that the only sexual pleasure she could get was from practising a very advanced form of fellatio.
At the time, Lovelace was a revelation: dark-haired and freckled, she made a refreshing contrast to the blonde stereotype of the time. Deep Throat was a rare porno in that it attracted couples, who saw Lovelace as the liberated girl next door, but the wholesome image was shattered in 1980 when she published her autobiography, Ordeal. Far from the free-thinking sexual revolutionary, Lovelace recast herself as the victim of an abusive marriage to her manager Chuck Traynor, a svengali figure who used hypnotism and violence to coerce her into making pornography.
The real Lovelace died in 2002, leaving behind a trail of inconsistencies, and though Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman's handsomely mounted period piece evokes the era with impressive detail, Lovelace's journey remains difficult to tell. This is nicely surmounted by a dramatic device that sees the story told twice, once in the rose-tinted hue of the myth, and again following a polygraph test, after which we see more of Traynor's brutal control. Nevertheless, the film-makers face an uphill struggle; neither version is really persuasive. Could the naive Linda really not have been aware that Deep Throat was a Mafia-controlled production? And why did the "other" Linda stick so long to the official version of her story when she had the world's media as a platform?
As entertainment, it works fine, never straying too far into Boogie Nights territory (although the music cues make it inevitable) and finding a sympathetic lead in Amanda Seyfried, who captures much of the real Lovelace's artless appeal. Equally good is Peter Sarsgaard, playing the full range of Traynor's spectrum, from sensitive lover to sex pest to wife beater. Many will ask why Lovelace put up with his beatings, but as the film shows, she had no back-up from her disciplinarian mother (an outstandingly unrecognisable Sharon Stone), who simply asks her, "What did you do?"
Lovelace has something in common with a British film in the festival, Michael Winterbottom's Paul Raymond biopic The Look of Love, in that it doesn't portray the porn world as inherently toxic. But this is still a much more morally shaded world than can be captured in a 90-minute movie, and though she emerges with her dignity restored, the ballad of Linda Lovelace remains one of those Rashomon-like tales that is unique in that the varying versions of the truth came from a single source: the storyteller herself.
