– Rosa Friedrich’s aborted attempt at documenting her friend filming a porno turns into a somewhat half-baked but entertaining essay on intimacy and sexuality
Timo and Rosa Friedrich in My Friend the Porn Star
Timo, a Vienna-based twenty-something, wants to shoot a porno. But shooting a porno doesn’t just involve hiring an actress and getting naked; it requires casting, STI testing and, hardest of all, coming up with a script. Timo’s friend, director Rosa Friedrich, sets out to document his journey to the “finishing line” – pun intended. But shortly before shooting wraps, Timo pulls out of the project. We meet him, and bid him farewell, within the film’s first ten minutes. Alas, Timo, we hardly knew you.
But not so fast. Friedrich decides to press on, finishing the project with a different focus. The result – a blend of fictional and documentary sequences – revolves around the question of intimacy: how do we want to be seen, as humans and as sexual beings? My Friend the Porn Star has just premiered in the Proxima Competition at the 60th Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, and Timo, in his own way, remains part of the project. AI, it turns out, is here to save the day, or at least Friedrich’s film. An actor’s face, identified only as Aaron, is superimposed onto Timo’s. Whatever the scene, the footage now shows Aaron’s beaming face atop Timo’s naked body.
While that footage could be salvaged, some of Friedrich’s other choices leave you wishing for a bit more AI first aid. Beyond Timo’s privates swinging into view almost too frequently, pairing that image with the director taking a bite out of a huge sausage amounts to sloppy symbolism at best. Surely there are more elegant ways to talk about body parts? Once you make it past the vagina-like papayas and other fruit, Friedrich does find her footing – even if, at times, it feels a bit by the playbook: round up some talking heads, mine their thoughts on sexuality and intimacy.
But Friedrich’s company – Hanna Teglasy, Alex, Jane Kosto, Alice Eric BigClit, Janina Vivianne, Carmen Schrenk, Sofie Federspiel, Emma Striche and Sam Hailey, who are, in no particular order, porn producers, porn stars, costume designers, photographers, stylists and even a dominatrix – do have something to say. Finally, it seems, we begin to scratch beneath the surface. How do they express intimacy? What counts as pornographic? To some, it’s a touch; to others, it’s power play; to some, once again, it’s fruit.
So there’s some fun and food for thought to be had – no more papayas, though. But Friedrich doesn’t just remark repeatedly to Timo that porn isn’t her cup of tea; you can feel it in the film. It’s a touch squeamish, and Friedrich leans into a cheerful visual register, with DoP Laura Ettel seeking out playful angles, and the colour grading settling somewhere between kitsch porn set and childlike wonderland. Cute, but at times a little too bubble-gum.
“You have to give your whole life” when presenting yourself as a porn star, one interviewee remarks. That rings true, and it leaves the viewer with a lingering sense that Timo simply wants to scratch an itch. His repeated failure to offer any script or shooting concept beyond “being in the moment” makes it seem as though he’s less interested in engaging with an art form than in finding a woman willing to be filmed.
Watching a man convinced that sex is too fleeting to fill his loneliness, you want to shout at him to go find a therapist. It’s up to the viewer to decide how comfortable they are with his persona; he certainly makes for a fascinating case study. But it’s his uptight, at times almost toxic stance, constantly bouncing off Rosa’s discomfort, that gives the film its spark.
My Friend the Porn Star was produced by Vienna-based Kacerovsky and is distributed internationally by New Docs.
