Berlin Review: Ruth Beckermann’s ‘Mutzenbacher’
deadline.comThe real star of Mutzenbacher, an austere Austrian documentary screening in the Encounters strand at the Berlin Film Festival, is a gaudy but once elegant settee that has seen better days, and likely even service in a 1970s pornographic movie (it is described early on as looking like “a former erotic sofa”).
Fittingly, it is literally a casting couch for director Ruth Beckermann, who entertains a parade of men aged between 16 and 99 — her specific criteria — as she holds an open audition for a role in her latest film.
What the men know is that Beckermann is putting together a film based on Josefine Mutzenbacher or The Story Of A Viennese Whore, a scandalous book published anonymously in the early 1900s, purportedly penned by Felix Salten, the author of Bambi.
What they don’t know is that there is no film, just pages of explicit content from the book that Beckermann will be using as a device with which to explore their most intimate thoughts and their attitudes towards sex and sexuality.Whatever the men had in mind, it’s pretty safe to say they were probably not expecting to find themselves in a disused coffin factory, with a couch, a piano, a hat rack, two chairs and a forlorn round gold lamé banquette.
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