Berlin Review: Ruth Beckermann’s ‘Mutzenbacher’

The 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. Signs scream, “No Smoking,” and Beckermann herself is a stern off-screen presence whose interactions may, at best, be described as combative.

Though the film races to fill non-Austrians in on the backstory of this notorious book — banned until 1968 and placed on a list of “youth-endangering media” until 2017 — there’s a specificity to this story that will likely limit its appeal to film festivals or literary events dissecting taboos and freedom of speech.

At first glance, there is something a little unkind about Beckermann’s film in the way she whittles down her subjects. Very early on, one of the more professional actors voices his concerns about the material but is clearly conflicted about losing the job. With him out of the way, Beckermann focuses on some of the strangest people ever to walk into a casting call, some there out of curiosity, others clearly compelled by the infamy of this book, once deemed the high watermark of pre-war erotica, now considered toxic with its depictions of what is now tantamount to child abuse (despite the title, the novel ends with Mutzenbacher becoming a prostitute at the grimly young age of 13).

There is some rich material here, not least in the darkly humorous fact that all the men quite happily read dialogues written for women, with no women other than Beckermann in sight. But there’s very little light relief, and the director’s acerbic, schoolmarm interrogations may actually be more uncomfortable for the viewer than the participants.

It doesn’t help that the rinse-and-repeat format of interviews and readings is stretched out to 100 minutes — Beckermann’s steel-willed commitment to staying out of the way is commendable, but it does leave rather a lot to the viewer. Nevertheless, it’s a noble effort to confront a thorny subject, although its power will be somewhat undermined in countries where Josefine Mutzenbacher and the artistic travails of her anonymous creator are little known.