Hardcore

Paul Schrader's second film, plainly continuing the vein of Taxi Driver, which he had written. Jake Van Dorn is a businessman in Michigan who grew up inside a strict Calvinist community. His daughter disappears on a church trip. A detective he has hired eventually shows him a film: the girl appears in a pornographic picture. He goes down to Los Angeles to look for her and walks into a place where not one word of his moral vocabulary works. Schrader himself was raised in a strict Calvinist household and was not allowed to see a film until he was seventeen; both the anger and the distance in the film come from there. The narrative skeleton is openly borrowed from a Western: a man travelling in pursuit of a lost girl, carrying his own loathing with him. George C. Scott plays the father, and the best scene in the film is his: he stages a casting session to find her and has to act. Hard, dirty and deliberately unpleasant. An important work for anyone who loves 1970s American cinema, and a misleading one for anyone expecting a realistic portrait of the pornography industry, because Schrader is not trying to understand that world but to show it through the eyes of a man disgusted by it.