Here is a strange, stark documentary from Austrian film-maker Ruth Beckermann, first presented at last year’s Berlin film festival: somewhere between a lab experiment and a practical joke, featuring the kind of non-professional performers who could easily crop up in a movie by Ulrich Seidl, that renowned Austrian chronicler of male grotesqueness.
The film’s purpose is to challenge the gendered nature of erotica and pornography through the simple but effective expedient of making men the object of the porn gaze. Beckermann puts men on camera as they read aloud – at various levels of excruciating discomfort – the female narrative voice from Josephine Mutzenbacher, a once-scandalous Viennese novel that contains the fictional confessions of a prostitute, published anonymously in 1906 and now thought to be the work of Felix Salten, who bizarrely also wrote the original Bambi books.
Beckermann advertised for men to audition for a film version of Josephine Mutzenbacher that she claimed to be making, but of course wasn’t. Age and experience? No problem. She gets the resulting miscellaneous bunch (one man actually has an ear trumpet) to sit on a plush red couch in what looks like some disused factory, and choose an explicit passage from the book to read aloud. Afterwards, she asks what they think, about their own early sexual experiences and what they think about the book’s still controversial paedophile passages. Periodically she gets her auditionees to gather together and chant the crudest bits like a football crowd. Many of the men are humorous and articulate; others are disquietingly intense and weird. One man commented that all the men in the book are revealed to be equally base, like those in Lars von Trier’s Dogville – a very interesting and apt comparison, one that comes close to intuiting the Von Trier-ish trick being played on these men.
But these men no doubt had to sign some sort of legal waiver to be used in the film, and perhaps Beckermann, like the hoax master Sacha Baron Cohen, actually paid them in cash then and there to head off any future legal comeback. Were they perhaps told that these “audition” scenes were going to be on the DVD extras? Or even form part of a larger, experimentalist adaptation? Maybe. Beckermann could have been a little more transparent with us about her working practices, but her anatomy of male fantasy is candid and apt.
• Mutzenbacher is available from 29 September on True Story.
