‘My Friend the Porn Star’ Review: A Kinky, Kooky German Doc

There are sex-positive films, and then there is My Friend the Porn Star, a movie that’s about as pro-copulation as possible without being an actual work of pornography. German director-star Rosa Friedrich keeps things just on the exhibitable side of NC-17 in terms of explicitness for this goofy but quite winning documentary about how she tried to make one kind of film and ended up making another.

The original idea was to record her friend Timo as he attempts to fulfill his own exhibitionistic desire by getting Rosa to film him having sex with assorted women. But the two have different artistic visions. When he suddenly ghosts her in the middle of production and just goes AWOL, like many a frustrated woman before her she finishes the project to her own satisfaction. She partly achieves this by using very obvious deep-fake technology to graft an actor’s head onto Timo’s body for the footage she’s already shot, so that we can see the real Timo from the neck down but with a pixelated box where the head should be of the actor she chose. (It’s not clear whose voice we’re ultimately hearing, the actor’s or Timo’s.)

Plus, she gets a very diverse group of women — including a dominatrix, a non-binary food-porn maker, three trans women in a polycule, and several others — to make little shorts about what they find erotic. All in all this makes for a sweet, funny and, yes, horny little package that should be very bookable for future festivals after its Karlovy Vary debut.

Although the film skips around Germanophone countries Germany and Austria while toggling between different time frames, Friedrich manages to get across how it all went wrong and then so very right for the end product we’re watching. I may be wrong, but almost in passing near the beginning it’s mentioned that Rosa and Timo were a heterosexual couple at one point, but now they are mainly just friends who are at ease with watching each other have sex with other people. Ish. At least Timo likes watching porn and sex in general while Rosa’s not that interested in it herself. Timo, however, is excited by the idea of people watching him, and feels like this is one way to get in touch with his feminine side, although his intellectual justifications change constantly, just as he can’t commit to what he wants to do with the film.

In the end, Friedrich makes this equivocation and self-questioning — not just Timo’s but that of other people too — a theme about how much we choose to reveal or conceal ourselves. In the end, she’s probably succeeded in making a more interesting film than what Timo seems to want to have made, the latter sounding for all intents and purposes like an exercise in narcissistic self-indulgence.

At any rate, before Timo ankled the project, he shot some scenes with several of the women he and Friedrich recruited at events like the Venus Expo in Berlin, a fair for “erotic and lifestyle.” Timo and Friedrich talk with Adrineh Simonian, a former opera singer who now produces porn and who’s full of sensible advice. The duo travel to Hungary to meet Donna, a well-known porn actor, but she decides not to take part in the shoot, for reasons not explained on camera but seemingly to do with the production’s lack of script and general professionalism.

Regularly inserted into the Timo sections are clips from the seven short films Friedrich ended up shooting with some of the people she met in the process, which explore what turns them on personally. Some of the footage is endearingly vanilla, some a bit more fruity — quite literally in the case of non-binary participant Alice Eric BigClit, who gets into a bathtub naked and has slices of fruit and whipped cream arranged artfully over their body.

The full spectrum of sexuality is discussed, if not quite shown, from BDSM to play with assorted gadgets to water sports and the like, but with much attention to why it all turns the subjects on, a focus on psychology more than anatomy. In the end, they show the package of shorts at an erotic film festival and Friedrich just holds on the faces of her cast as they watch the films, delighting in seeing themselves being seen. It’s that joyousness that really makes this such a relatable, kooky-kinky delight, along with Friedrich and editor Melanie Schmidt’s natural comic timing.