Helmut Berger, Actor

"Maybe the best motion picture of the year is also the worst? One-time dreamboat movie star and lover of Visconti, Helmut Berger, now seventy-one and sometimes looking like Marguerite Duras, rants and raves in his ramshackle apartment while the maid dishes the dirt about his sad life. The rules of documentary access are permanently fractured here when our featured attraction takes off all his clothes on camera, masturbates, and actually ejaculates. The Damned, indeed," says cult director John Waters.
Is this a thumbs up or down? Once a sex symbol and art film icon, now an emblem of faded glory, his walls covered with photos of yesteryear. Who is the star when time and age take ownership of his face? Is he still in charge of his appearance? And what is this odd eroticised, even sexually loaded entanglement between director and protagonist? Whose film is this, anyway? And at what point do we take our own responsibility? Film introduced by a video essay by Hugo Emmerzael.