Movie review by Greg Carlson

Doing press for “Killers of the Flower Moon,” Martin Scorsese has defended the movie’s three and a half hour running time (presented during its theatrical engagement with no intermission), but the results on the screen do the real talking. The master director’s latest American original – a sturdy blend of genres and conventions including the Western, the “based on a true story” lesson and history-by-suggestion, the family epic, the melodrama, and the crime/gangster film – come together to make something unique to the special artistry of Scorsese, who is most certainly one of our finest living motion picture directors.

David Grann’s nonfiction book of the same title pulls together many threads to explicate an underrepresented chapter of our country’s racist past. The seemingly worthless land inhabited by the members of the Osage Nation covered oil reserves that enriched the tribe beyond anyone’s wildest dream of wealth. As a result, a crooked scaffold of laws, regulations, schemes, plots, and plans were erected by white people to siphon as much money as possible into their own pockets. Attitudes of entitlement, superiority, and unchecked avarice led to an epidemic of murdered Osage in the early 1920s.

The brilliance of Scorsese’s adaptation revolves around two interpersonal relationships: the romantic bond and marriage between Leonardo DiCaprio’s Ernest Burkhart and Lily Gladstone’s Mollie Kyle and the sinister alliance between Burkhart and his uncle William Hale (Robert De Niro). DiCaprio fashions a career-best performance as the utterly fucked-up Burkhart. The man’s restlessness and greed are at first the only signifiers of Ernest’s personal drive and motivation. The actor’s instincts to lobby for the part of Burkhart instead of taking the role of federal investigator Tom White (in early drafts, the story was told from the lawman’s perspective) prove correct.

Gladstone is mesmerizing in the most difficult and challenging of the central roles. For much of the movie, Mollie is an invalid deliberately mistreated with spiked insulin administered by Ernest. Film critics and Gladstone’s collaborators have sung the praises of her contributions to the film. And there is no doubt that she deserves all accolades, but I would have appreciated an opportunity to spend time with Mollie in equal measure to the minutes devoted to Ernest. In his “New Yorker” review, Richard Brody lays out a convincing case for Mollie’s use of silence and Scorsese’s reasons for minimal character psychology. It may just be part of the larger point that Ernest does things while Mollie has things done to her.

The glue that holds the huge and sweeping “Killers of the Flower Moon” together is the strange and inexplicable love between Ernest and Mollie, even as Ernest’s moral bankruptcy is a constant reminder of the unwholesome, unholy, and degrading treatment of Native Americans by men like Hale, whose evil is as terrifying as anything seen in a horror movie. Because this particular rendition was not directed by a member of the Osage Nation, it cannot be what Chris Eyre would call an “inside job.” As such, Gladstone’s interpretation of Mollie becomes even more important as the means by which viewers of all races come to appreciate and understand Scorsese’s point of entry to this vital moment in time.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Peter Dinklage plays a creatively blocked opera composer married to Anne Hathaway’s frustrated therapist in Rebecca Miller’s “She Came to Me,” a lighthearted if lightweight film that depends heavily on the outsize talents of its ensemble as it circles issues of love, freedom, and commitment to self and others. On the way to becoming decidedly unblocked, Dinklage’s Steven meets tugboat captain Katrina (Marisa Tomei, making it work), whose clinical addiction to romance and sex inspires the musical tour de force that also provides the film’s title.

Meanwhile, Steven’s stepson Julian (Evan Ellison) has been intensifying a sexual relationship with girlfriend Tereza (Harlow Jane), not realizing that the small age gap between the two will emerge as a significant legal problem once Tereza’s stepdad Trey (Broadway vet Brian d’Arcy James) finds out what is happening. Tereza’s mother Magdalena (Joanna Kulig) opposes Trey, vowing to do whatever it takes to stand up for her child. Miller filters much of the film’s conflict through the Tereza/Julian story, using the mirror of dual stepfathers to touch on the class differences between the more affluent world of Julian and the less wealthy household where Tereza resides.

The movie’s setting is the dreamy version of New York popularized for so many years by the cinema of Woody Allen and seen recently in Nicole Holfcener’s “You Hurt My Feelings.” Sam Levy’s cinematography is lovely throughout. In addition to showcasing real estate that might result in some drooling, Miller stages a number of scenes in visually stimulating environs, from the dive bar where Steven first encounters Katrina to the harbor patrolled by tugboat to the fields where a Civil War battle is reenacted.

As the story unfolds, you might occasionally wish that Miller would indulge the weirder impulses of her storytelling (her 2013 novel “Jacob’s Folly” – which she should make into a movie – concerns an 18th century Frenchman reincarnated as a modern-day housefly able to enter the consciousness of others). Nonetheless, the souls who populate “She Came to Me” fret and struggle en route to affirmations of big hearts and hope for tomorrow. The staging of Steven’s work is thrilling enough for us to desire access to the whole thing. Miller received help from several Metropolitan Opera pros and performers.

Most recently, Miller wrote and directed a 2017 documentary about her father, the playwright and American institution Arthur Miller, but her last dramatic feature was “Maggie’s Plan” in 2015. Reviewing that movie, I noted that Greta Gerwig’s title character is a “woman so determined to set things right in the universe that she selflessly orchestrates what she believes is the best possible outcome to her own failed romance.” That sentiment applies at least in part to Hathaway’s Patricia. Both she and Maggie depend on order and organization. The narrative in “She Came to Me” doesn’t stick as closely to Patricia’s arc as it does to the experiences of Steven, but Miller makes certain to end the movie with a slow pan that pays off the key personalities we have come to know.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Kyra Elise Gardner, the daughter of special effects legend Tony Gardner, writes and directs “Living With Chucky,” an affectionate labor-of-love account covering the long evolution of the “Child’s Play” horror franchise. Beginning in 1988, the series built a devoted cult following around the popularity of Chucky, the seemingly innocent toy inhabited by the soul of a foul-mouthed serial killer and psychopath voiced by the great Brad Dourif. Gardner’s documentary unfolds in part like a comfy home video but struggles to transcend the contours of a standard behind-the-scenes featurette and/or electronic press kit that would be included with the bonus material on a DVD or Blu-ray.

“Living With Chucky” leans heavily on talking head interviews with several of the key players in the “Child’s Play” universe, including the elder Gardner, Dourif, Dourif’s daughter Fiona, writer/director/Chucky creator Don Mancini, producer David Kirschner, and original Andy Barclay portrayer Alex Vincent, to name just a few. The filmmaker organizes the anecdotes in mostly chronological order, working through the half-dozen sequels (and touching on the episodic series made for Syfy) as the main chapter stops. At its best, “Living With Chucky” grapples with the challenges of bringing the proudly physical doll to gloriously puppeteered life.

Given the incredible achievements of Tony Gardner, perhaps a better movie might have emerged focusing on the full breadth of his career. From very first professional gig appearing as more than one zombie in Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” music video to realizing the self-amputation in Danny Boyle’s “127 Hours” to helping design the Daft Punk helmets, Gardner’s creative output with Alterian, Inc. boasts a lengthy list of highlights on dozens of feature films, TV shows, commercials, and music videos. Toward the end of “Living With Chucky,” Kyra Gardner gets personal, recounting the challenges of growing up with a father whose work kept him away from home on many important occasions.

Of course, Chucky is a bigger celebrity than Tony Gardner, and the movie relies on the comments of Mancini to put the legacy of the freckled redhead into perspective. Killer toys, dummies, and dolls have long provided the horror and fantasy genres with any number of memorable touchstones. The subversion and/or perversion of childhood innocence and safety through the malevolent influence of dangerous doppelgangers often alludes to some kind of trauma experience or family dysfunction. Chucky comes from a line of predecessors including James Cruze’s “The Great Gabbo,” the amazing “Living Doll” episode of “The Twilight Zone” (mentioned twice near the beginning of “Living With Chucky”) and the “Amelia” chapter in “Trilogy of Terror,” though the documentary spends little time contemplating cinematic ancestors.

Mancini directly addresses the ways in which he sought to introduce a greater degree of queerness into the “Child’s Play” films, but the conversation surrounding the addition of Chucky and Tiffany’s genderfluid offspring Glen (despite reactions by Jennifer Tilly, John Waters, Billy Boyd, and others) never quite goes as deep as one would like. Gardner also entirely skips over the 2019 reboot, perhaps a sore subject given the absence of the original creative team. Despite that omission, “Living With Chucky” illustrates the realities of a tough business, where diminishing box office receipts translate to smaller and smaller budgets. That said, I wouldn’t count Chucky out just yet.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

As reactions and reviews to Wes Anderson’s return to the world of Roald Dahl attest, the quartet of short story adaptations undoubtedly would have been better experienced as a theatrical omnibus akin to “The French Dispatch” rather than the one-a-day releases selected for streaming by Netflix, where the set now resides. At 40 minutes, “The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar” – which enjoyed a Venice Film Festival premiere at the beginning of September – holds pride of place as the leader and longest of the movies, but the briefer additions only enhance and expand the remarkable considerations of the increasingly brilliant Anderson.

The Dahl shorts join the mind-scrambling “Asteroid City” to make a strong argument that 2023 might just be Anderson’s most vital year to date. The director’s storytelling preoccupations have long entertained a fascination with the matryoshka of stories within stories and the intersection between the literary and the cinematic, even if those aspects receive less attention than the stylistic showmanship marked by mise-en-scène that is instantly recognizable to those who count themselves among the filmmaker’s faithful devotees.

“The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar,” a deceptively simple moral fable about a man who comes to appreciate the joy of serving others, stars Benedict Cumberbatch as the title character, a fabulously wealthy gambler who learns a mystical technique that allows him to see without using his eyes. Joined by Ben Kingsley, Dev Patel and Richard Ayoade, Cumberbatch embraces the technical challenges set before him, presenting a multilayered blend of textual recitation (often straight from Dahl’s pages) directly addressed to the camera and facially expressive moments communicating the subtleties of what Bela Belasz described as the “polyphonic play of features.”

The chilling terror of “The Swan,” which also appeared in the 1977 short story collection headlined by “Sugar,” sharpens the focus of Anderson’s experiment. Adding Asa Jennings and Rupert Friend as child and grown-up representations of narrator Peter Watson, the recollection of traumatizing cruelty and bullying is rendered all the more powerful by the use of carefully choreographed pantomime and elision. Stagehands enter and exit the frame to deliver and retrieve various props, functioning as supreme exemplars of Brecht’s distancing effect, along with rear projection, forced perspective, and moving backdrops.

With the arrival of “The Rat Catcher,” Anderson leaves little doubt that his depiction of Dahl has come a long way from “Fantastic Mr. Fox.” Those reliable filmmaking hallmarks, including stop-motion animation and the perfect placement of miniatures and models, are joined by “invisible” elements and several clues hiding in plain sight that affirm a more sophisticated grasp of subtext. Ralph Fiennes, who also embodies the Dahl surrogate working in the unique hut/vardo of Gipsy House in framing devices for each of the four movies, plays the devoted, rodent-like exterminator sent to rid a hayrick of vermin. If we pay close attention, Anderson invites us to account for the failure of this grim pied piper.

It is perhaps the combination of the Rat Man and the frozen racist Harry Pope (Cumberbatch) of final short “Poison” that lights up the filament of Anderson’s unifying thesis, driving us toward a more nuanced consideration of Dahl. Writing for “Vulture,” Esther Zuckerman makes a bold claim that Anderson is now comfortable questioning the popular myths surrounding the author. Zuckerman reminds us of Dahl’s antisemitism before writing that the four films “make a case for the multitudes people contain: the capacity for wonder and kindness as well as unrepentant bigotry and meanness.” But how far is Anderson opening the door to new scrutiny?

Future essays by Anderson scholars will address all this and more. The absence of women can be blamed on the source material, but given Anderson’s boldness, would gender-blind casting for some roles have been out of line given Dahl’s other weaknesses? Along with that deficiency, Anderson will also be taken to task for what some perceive as the fetishizing/exoticizing of India first displayed in “The Darjeeling Limited.” Witnesses for the defense, however, will cite Anderson’s abiding Indo-cinephilia and a subtext critical of the colonizer as evidence to the contrary.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Filmmaker Jacqueline Castel’s “My Animal” premiered at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival in January, but its vibes are better suited to the rising blood moon of autumn’s spooky season. Now available on major streaming services following a brief theatrical run in select cinemas, Castel’s feature directorial debut is poised to scratch the itch of discerning horror hounds who appreciate slow-burn smarts as much as gory violence. The film’s modest budget and intellectual preoccupations limit the onscreen depictions of werewolf mayhem, but the sensitive bid for empathy and knockout performances by Bobbi Salvör Menuez and Amandla Stenberg make up for small narrative shortcomings.

Menuez’s Heather has reached adulthood but continues to live at home with both parents and younger twin siblings. Castel takes advantage of the well-worn, semi-rural Canadian setting (principal photography took place in the city of Timmins in northeastern Ontario) to outline Heather’s sense of stasis, yearning, and frustration. Patriarch Henry (the great veteran performer Stephen McHattie) runs a local diner and navigates a stormy marriage to alcoholic spouse Patti (Heidi von Palleske). Father and daughter have a special bond, but Castel hints that the out-of-sorts Patti also self-medicates to cope with some unspeakable trauma.

Soon enough, Castel lets us in on the contours of a curious routine: heavy chains and shackles secure Heather to a crimson-sheeted bed each time the moon is full. The members of the nuclear unit know and accept the situation, even if very little needs to be said out loud in reference to Heather’s lycanthropy. The silence extends (although that will change) to Heather’s queerness, another secret emphasizing otherness and outcast status in a world of conservative conformity and expectations that fulfill traditional gender roles. Actor Menuez identifies as trans and nonbinary, but Castel presents the character as femme, underlining the way hockey coach Dutch (Dean McDermott) initially refuses to consider Heather for a goaltender position on the men’s team.

The arrival of Stenberg’s beguiling figure skater Jonny sets Heather’s heart aflame. Stenberg, who also serves as one of the movie’s producers and contributes a song to the appealing, retro-styled soundtrack, brings a strong and sensual eroticism to the budding relationship – first in sultry and symbolic fantasies/dreams and later in a fragile and delicate reality fraught with dangers of several sorts. It seems easy and obvious to read Heather’s sapphic sexual awakening and the imperative to keep hidden the “curse” of werewolf transformation as parallels, but Castel – assisted by the chemistry of the actors – excels at drawing a deep connection despite a familiar conflict.

Like many young romances of novel and cinema, the emotional intimacy between Heather and Jonny is threatened by forces both large and small, internal and external. Castel shrewdly links Heather’s perspective and point of view directly to the viewer; the consuming fears and frustrations become ours as the story moves toward fuller revelations. The final sequences comment on mother-child bonds in a manner far more satisfying than the deliberately open-ended question of Jonny and Heather, though one can make an educated guess before the credits roll.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Many films have used the unsettling revelation of tattoos as a device to startle the viewer with a visual roadmap to a deeper understanding of character. The “love” and “hate” lettering across the knuckles of Robert Mitchum’s Reverend Harry Powell in “The Night of the Hunter,” in the context of the character’s chilling speech, still inspires nightmares. In “Cape Fear,” Mitchum’s Lieutenant Elgart quips of Robert De Niro’s Max Cady (a villain Mitchum originated on screen in 1962), “I don’t know whether to look at him or read him.” The prison tattoos on the body of Viggo Mortensen’s mysterious Nikolai Luzhin in “Eastern Promises” communicate a detailed history. Francis Dolarhyde’s Blake-inspired dragon, Lisbeth Salander’s own complex ink, and the grim reminders guiding Guy Pearce’s Leonard Shelby are just a few more that come to mind.

But hate tattoos of Nazism and white power reside in their own category of cinematic shock. In “Romper Stomper,” “American History X,” “The Believer,” “Skin,” and others, the display of swastikas, iron crosses, death’s heads, and other Third Reich-related runes, black suns and Parteiadler shock and stun as symbols of evil pasts and harbingers of potentially bad things yet to come. Paul Schrader draws from the trope in “Master Gardener,” the final installment of his loose, so-called “Man in a Room” trilogy that began with “First Reformed” in 2017. Second entry “The Card Counter” followed in 2021. All three movies are indebted to Schrader’s commitment to slow cinema as originally outlined in his 1972 book, “Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer.”

Like the first two segments – and so many of Schrader’s previous movies – the filmmaker’s obsession with exploring tendencies toward self-destruction alongside the seemingly incongruous accompaniment of redemption links his filmography to the careers of the cinematic heroes he wrote about. In “Master Gardener,” Joel Edgerton takes on the occupation of the title as Narvel Roth, a devoted horticulturist who oversees the foliage of Gracewood Gardens, the grounds belonging to the wealthy Norma Haverhill (Sigourney Weaver). Norma, who we come to learn knows a great deal about Narvel’s past, informs him that her troubled grandniece Maya Core (Quintessa Swindell) will be joining the staff as Narvel’s apprentice.

The arrival of Maya introduces a triangle that will initiate some measure of return to the kinds of antisocial behavior Narvel practiced before he made the changes that led him to Gracewood. True to form, Schrader opts for the austerity and narrative asceticism he so admires. Those choices will delight some viewers as surely as they will alienate and frustrate others. In his curious essay on the film, Richard Brody crafts an argument that “Master Gardener” is “altogether different” from the preceding movies in the trilogy, positing that Schrader’s decision to hold at arm’s length the “matters of history and of race, of mentorship and of gardening” are deficiently ornamental and instrumental.

While I agree with Brody’s characterization of “Master Gardener” as an erotic thriller (even if that assessment is too limiting and narrow), I don’t go along with the assessment claiming a weak and tenuous link between Narvel’s redemption and the minimal effort of “a change of heart, good works, and a sense of self-punishing submission to the terms and conditions of one’s new life.” Instead, Schrader’s wicked caginess and determined reticence carves out the necessary room for us to use our own imaginations when it comes to making sense of these peculiar people.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Rachel Sennott and Ayo Edebiri play best pals PJ and Josie, woebegone nerds hot for cheerleaders Brittany (Kaia Gerber) and Isabel (Havana Rose Liu) in a high school caste system that looks and feels quite familiar to fans of the durable teen sex comedy. In “Bottoms,” directed by Emma Seligman – who co-wrote the screenplay with her “Shiva Baby” star Sennott – the satire, the visual gags, the gross-outs, and the gusto combine to form one of this year’s most entertaining and refreshing confections. It may not be “Heathers,” or even “Booksmart,” but “Bottoms” boasts more than enough weirdness and originality to earn cult re-watch status.

Seligman successfully establishes the tonal sweet spot for “Bottoms” to blossom and thrive via healthy suspension of disbelief. Like a number of its influences, the film constructs a complete Bizarro-level universe tweaked with three drops of strong metanarrative potion (it never hurts to allude to the fantasy of high school students brought to life by performers in their late 20s and up). We’re back in that place where preening football heroes dress in their uniforms 24/7, a teacher openly peruses a porn glossy titled “Divorced and Happy” during class, and an outlandish scheme to engage in heavy petting launches a self-defense and empowerment group that morphs quickly into a fight club.

Most of the hype ahead of the movie’s wide release focused on the outrageous premise. The description accompanying a Google search still reads, “Unpopular best friends PJ and Josie start a high school fight club to meet girls and lose their virginity,” which isn’t entirely accurate, since our protagonists already shoulder significant and specific unrequited crushes on Brittany and Isabel, whom they already know. But the point is that Seligman and Sennott merely use the eye-catching fight club angle as a means to harden a much more ambitious odyssey through the timeworn tropes and expectations of mainstream teensploitation.

By cultivating a world where audacious and ample profanity peppers the steady flow of observations which are always stretching fully into the territory of adulthood, “Bottoms” prepares us for its glimpses of more pointed social commentary. Conversely, Seligman deliberately chooses not to warn viewers about some of its most brazen demonstrations of movie make-believe. The climactic gridiron fracas, which pulls together a bomb plot, a contaminated sprinkler system, and a gladiatorial nerds-versus-jocks showdown close in spirit to the anarchic news team battle royal in “Anchorman,” brings it in a very particular way.

Seligman and Sennott will likely receive plenty of heat from both conservative and politically-correct voices sure to scold the movie’s utterly brutal commitment to humor in the service of its bigger message. “Bottoms,” unafraid to include jokes about rape and sexual assault, eating disorders, terroristic threats, suicide and self-harm, bullying, and a whole lot more, walks a tightrope during a period of acute scrutiny and culture-policing. Its willingness to offend without apology turns out to be its knockout punch. I look forward to reading the anniversary-marking think pieces and hot takes when the movie celebrates its tenth and twentieth birthdays.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

In Sundance Grand Jury Prize winner “Scrapper,” her feature debut as writer and director, Charlotte Regan establishes a much more whimsical tone than the darker notes sounded by Charlotte Wells in her masterful “Aftersun.” There are more than enough stories exploring difficult father-daughter relationships to chalk up the similarities between the two movies as a fluke of timing, but Regan’s film faces the unenviable challenge of premiering in the wake of so many critical accolades deservingly showered on Wells’s own cinematic arrival. Regan’s entertaining film won’t land at the top of as many year-end “best of” lists as its predecessor, but it is worth seeking out.

Regan introduces the viewer to protagonist Georgie (Lola Campbell), a resourceful 12-year-old devoted to avoiding placement within the foster care system following the death of her mother. Georgie, like the plucky hero of a classic young adult novel, stays one step ahead of the authorities, enlisting the aid of voice recordings from a convenience store employee to fool any social worker who attempts to confirm her welfare. Without any responsible grownup in sight, Georgie turns to petty crime with pal Ali (Alin Uzun) to make ends meet until the surprise arrival of her previously absent father Jason (Harris Dickinson).

Like Paul Mescal and Frankie Corio, the sparking (and sparkling) chemistry between Campbell and Dickinson propels the action and engages the viewer. Regan draws from the tradition of wise-beyond-their-years kids reversing roles with adults who could use some parenting of their own. Sheila O’Malley, who wrote a terrific 2019 piece on the golden age of “tomboy movies” for “Film Comment,” picked up on the “Paper Moon” vibes in her “Scrapper” review for the Roger Ebert site. Just as we are given permission to cheer the generational con artists in Bogdanovich’s movie, Regan sympathizes with a dad who passes down his bicycle-theft knowledge to his offspring.

Dickinson, who has been so great in projects like “Beach Rats” and “Triangle of Sadness,” nails the contradictions of Jason’s arrested development. Longing for connection and a sense of greater responsibility, the performance illustrates how much childhood remains inside someone who became a parent while still a kid himself. Paired with Campbell, a newcomer who more than holds her own with the screen veteran, Dickinson finds all kinds of places only hinted at in the script. Georgie’s grief at the loss of her closest companion and caregiver may be more outwardly apparent, but Jason also earns our empathy.

Paul Klein identifies similarities and differences between “Aftersun” and “Scrapper,” but argues that both are important films for the simple fact that their portrayals of “people from broken homes and lower incomes” avoid demonizing many choices that might be seen as symptoms of class struggle. Klein goes on to commend Regan’s decision to emphasize Georgie’s use of fantasy and imagination rather than to focus on poverty and suffering. Multiple reviews have overstated the various ways in which “Scrapper” evokes the cinema of Wes Anderson, but there is no question that Regan’s Georgie-level worldview carefully stylizes what would otherwise be grim reality.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Ruth Beckermann’s “Mutzenbacher” invites viewers to consider the traditional dynamics of the erotic novel – and subsequent filmic depictions of eroticism – by rearranging the visual furniture most closely associated with the voyeuristic gaze privileging the straight, white, male producer/consumer. The filmmaker uses “Josephine Mutzenbacher or, The Story of a Viennese Whore as Told by Herself,” the anonymously-published 1906 book, as a vehicle to explore sexuality, masculinity, taboo, power, and fantasy. Beckermann invites roughly 100 men, age 16 to 99, to “audition” for a film by reading aloud several graphic excerpts as solo performers or in pairs and small groups.

The tactic initially mirrors the longstanding custom of the humiliating “cattle call” tryout in which young women are brutally judged as much for their physical appearance as for their acting ability (see charged examples in “Showgirls,” “Girl 6,” “Always Shine,” “Mulholland Dr.” and many others). Beckermann, who we hear interacting with her subjects from behind the camera, does not ask the participants to undress, but many other elements receive sharp deconstruction. As Charles Bramesco shrewdly observes,  “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.”

At one time attributed to Arthur Schniztler and later credited to “Bambi” author Felix Salten, “Josephine Mutzenbacher” recounts the debauched carnal education of the title character as she looks back from middle age to her life from 5 to 13, the period before she finds employment as a prostitute. Beckermann stages her interviews in a former coffin factory, frequently emphasizing a sofa covered in a pinkish floral motif as a triple reminder of source material, Freudian psychoanalysis, and casting couch. Viewers unfamiliar with the novel are brought up to speed through the fascinating exchanges that Beckermann shares with the colorful parade of curious and aspiring performers.

Since at least 1970, more than a dozen film versions inspired by “Josephine Mutzenbacher” have been produced, along with live cabaret adaptations, parodies, and audiobook recordings. As Beckermann points out through the on-camera interviews that preface several of the conversations included in her film, the story is well-known to native German speakers, equally as famous as Cleland’s “Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure” (1748) is in the English language realm. Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s “Venus in Furs” (1870) and several of Sade’s writings boast broader recognition. The latter’s works had a clear influence on the author of “Josephine Mutzenbacher.”

Beckermann teases all manner of responses from her interview subjects. Some lean into the most salacious and disturbing content, lamenting what they perceive as our current era’s more conservative moral climate. Others squirm in embarrassment or discomfort at the ribald prose. The filmmaker frequently uses the readings as a starting point from which to probe the personal histories and moral beliefs of the volunteers. The cumulative effect of Beckermann’s men-only conceit ultimately directs viewers to reframe aspects of identification with others, as the readers narrate the action via the first-person perspective from which they recite.