(Is the) Berlinale Addicted to Porn-Addiction(?)
Jakarta by night: A good-looking taxi driver takes erotic pictures and toilet paper out of the glove compartment. Staring at the gorgeous naked women on the images he discretely masturbates. But the job is quickly interrupted when a customer gets into the car. As soon as he returns home he turns on the TV to watch porn — he has got a quite impressive collection of X-rated DVDs carelessly left on the floor — and pleasures himself. When he wakes up the next day the first thing he does is play another DVD. These onanism scenes will repeat themselves again and again in Something in the Way, a portrayal of a porn-addicted lonely young man by Indonesian director Teddy Soeriaatmadjaa, shown in the Panorama section.
Porn addiction and solitary sex among young (and attractive) men having grown up with the Internet was a notable trend of Berlinale 2013. The most striking example came with Don Jon’s Addiction which showed in the section Panorama Special. In his first feature as director, Joseph Gordon-Levitt (unforgettable as Neil in Greg Araki’s excellent Mysterious Skin (2004) plays an early-twenty-first-century Don Juan from the East Coast whom all chicks just cannot resist (including hilarious turned-Stella Scarlett Johansson) but who still prefers having fun with his right hand. He puts it simply: “Porn is better than sex”.
Beyond the typically American buddy-style comedy, the endless reflection on sex-versus-love and men-versus-women finds here a new, direct and interesting perspective: whatever you might think about porn shaping contemporary male desires and obsessions with sexual performance, it is by no means more shameful than teenage girls brainwashed by TV-spread standardized ‘romantic’ schemes. The word ‘shameful’ is here used on purpose, referring to Steve McQueen’s moralist view in his acclaimed film (2011) showing a man condemned with Shame (right from the title) for being sex-addicted. Don Jon will find a luckier outcome than Michael Fassbender/Brandon Sullivan: love — at least temporarily — ‘cures’ him from porn obsession…
Moral issues are also present in Something in the Way with the character of the radical imam (somehow expected in the largest Muslim country in the world) whose religious sermons are regularly listened to by horny taxi-driver Ahmad. These sequences at the mosque are too explicative and so obviously contrasting with Ahmad’s main interest that it is hard to be convinced by them (while the pros outweigh the cons considering the whole 90 minutes of the film). Yet the ironic thing is that, by constantly repeating Islamic tenets forbidding premarital sex, the imam gives Ahmad a strong reason to continue his sleazy solitary work.
Fascination for porn at the Berlinale also came with two films in the Panorama section paying tribute to two “classics” of edgy American cinema: the mythic X-rated Deep Throat (1972) and William Friedkin’s cop thriller Cruising (1980) from which 40 minutes were cut (and have never ever been screened since by) to avoid an X-rating when released. Both have James Franco credited although he has clearly not the same implication in them. The first one (Lovelace by Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman, not seen) is a discovery-rise-and-fall biopic on porn star Linda Lovelace who became an instant star and the symbol of sexual revolution thanks to her supposed ‘sensational talent for oral sex’.
In Interior Leather Bar James Franco has (presumably) got the lead role as he co-directed this documentary alongside Travis Mathews. Their idea was to show, by re-shooting (re-imagining?) thirty years later, Friedkin’s scenes of gay sex inside the New York S&M clubs Al Pacino/Steve Burns was frequenting as an undercover agent. Al Pacino’s part is played by a straight young actor who seems to be half-attracted half-repulsed by the experience. The supporting actors, either gays or straights, seem to take the challenge with less concern and more fun. Yet they have nothing to say about it when interviewed by the two directors who try to give the project an intellectual background. Even James Franco, whose interest for sex between men has been confirmed by his own essay-like films — leading to a legitimate question: Isn’t he just using the camera to come out of the closet? — states here quite simplistic thoughts about gay sex (“beautiful and attractive”!) versus social norms (conservative and binding) as one might know.
As for the viewer, watching this crew re-doing porn-oriented Cruising’s lost sequences is quite boring. But we all know there is nothing less exciting than attending an X-film shooting. You’d better watch the final product by yourself as Ahmad and Don Jon constantly do.
Edited by Steven Yates
© FIPRESCI 2013