Mutzen­bach­er – first-look review

A sem­i­nal work in more ways than one, the 1908 nov­el Jose­fine Mutzen­bach­er or the Sto­ry of a Vien­nese Whore, as Told by Her­self cat­a­logues a smörgås­bord of explic­it sex­u­al devian­cy through one woman’s mem­oir of her nympho­ma­ni­ac girl­hood. Start­ing at five years of age, she speed-runs her way through every taboo society’s got, though her indis­crim­i­nate car­nal appetite has been rout­ed accord­ing to the dis­tinct­ly male per­spec­tive of its author. (The text is offi­cial­ly unat­trib­uted, but schol­ars have traced its prove­nance back to Felix Salter, who would pen a dif­fer­ent sort of kid­die clas­sic lat­er in life with the Dis­ney-pop­u­lar­ized Bambi.)

Through the emp­ty promise of the sub­ti­tle, the book trans­par­ent­ly laun­ders a lech­ery geared to the most exot­ic tastes of het­ero­sex­u­al men, even as its gid­dy prose demon­strates that a many-splen­dored thing such as fuck­ing can mean what­ev­er we want it to. Albeit in a more know­ing fash­ion, Ruth Beckermann’s doc­u­men­tary Mutzen­bach­er repro­duces this lib­er­at­ing para­dox, tak­ing mas­culin­i­ty as a spec­i­fied point of ingress to a freer, more expan­sive view of all that sex can be and do. In recit­ing Salter’s bluest prose under the dis­com­fit­ing gaze of the cam­era, the par­tic­i­pants expe­ri­ence every feel­ing on the spec­trum, unit­ed only in the strength of their reactions.

As if assem­bling an ark fueled by testos­terone, Beck­er­mann gath­ered every type of guy — straight, queer, old, young, Black, white, all of them resplen­dent in the smartest fall jack­ets cen­tral Europe has to offer — in a spar­tan ware­house for an exper­i­ment in desta­bi­liz­ing empa­thy. Every aspect of the process, from the forced-femme nar­ra­tion fos­ter­ing iden­ti­fi­ca­tion across gen­der lines to the sub­ju­gat­ed approval-seek­ing recall­ing anx­ious star­lets, has been cal­i­brat­ed to under­cut macho impuls­es so that we might explore what lies beneath. In time, as Beck­er­mann stat­ed dur­ing a Q&A at the New York Film Fes­ti­val, the cast­ing couch trans­forms into Freud’s ther­a­peu­tic sofa.

She pairs up her sub­jects to tease out the dif­fer­ences between them, some­times allow­ing her­self dichotomies sim­pler than her pris­mat­ic view of eroti­cism; one seg­ment match­es a hip-look­ing mil­len­ni­al with a raspy-voiced pen­sion­er spout­ing men’s rights talk­ing points about an open sea­son on patri­archs. The coaxed divul­gences more fre­quent­ly lead us to sur­pris­ing places, as in a soft-spo­ken twentysomething’s recount­ing of his refresh­ing­ly mat­ter-of-fact dal­liance in sex work. One of the men mus­es on the para­mount impor­tance of not feel­ing judged as he offers up his can­dor, a handy dis­til­la­tion of the respect­ful yet irrev­er­ent open­ness at work in Beckermann’s frisky the­o­ret­i­cal frameworks.

Though the method in use fol­lows the exam­ple of Kit­ty Green’s keen Cast­ing Jon­Benet, which also took the dynam­ics of audi­tion­ing as a com­ment on the sex­u­al­iza­tion of under­age girls, the come-as-you-are spir­it of the Vagi­na Mono­logues comes clos­er to the essence of the project. A cel­e­bra­tion of flesh in all its imper­fect, unruly forms, the oft-per­formed col­lec­tion of read­ings has come under crit­i­cism in recent years for one pas­sage detail­ing a for­ma­tive sap­ph­ic rela­tion­ship between a thir­teen- and twen­ty-four-year-old. The Mutzen­bach­er vol­un­teers con­front this same ten­sion between con­ven­tion­al moral­i­ty and the indif­fer­ence of desire to it, some dis­gust­ed by preda­to­ry imag­i­na­tions and oth­ers tick­led by the indul­gence of out­ré tastes in a fic­tive safe space.

If Beckermann’s anti-con­clu­sive results can be reduced to the gener­ic wis­dom that horni­ness is a land of con­trasts, then the con­tra­dic­tion inher­ent in nat­ur­al-yet-for­bid­den urges is the juici­est one. In this mul­ti­far­i­ous ensem­ble, every­one ulti­mate­ly falls into one of two cat­e­gories: , those whose uncom­fort­able gig­gles or vis­i­ble revul­sion hint at their own male guilt, and those with an intu­itive, unshack­led under­stand­ing that we can’t turn off what turns us on.