Fantastic Fest Review: Helmut Berger, Actor

There actually isn’t much of a plot or direction to Andreas Horvath’s Dalian portrait of actor, Austrian film icon and Luchino Visconti muse/lover Helmut Berger.

The viewer starts at the downward spiral’s ignominious tail end, a shameless Berger masturbating in front of Horvath. What ensues in this film may hasten the fade of whatever veneration of the European jet-set of yesteryear remains.

Stabilized only by Berger’s maid, who tells of Berger’s youth, relationship with his mother, and potential child abuse by boarding school clerics, you learn virtually nothing about Berger’s past – beyond the excesses of fame – from Berger himself.

Horvath assumes the viewer understands Berger’s fame, from his strong performances in Visconti’s The Damned, and as the title character in Ludwig. Also clear is Berger’s descent after Visconti’s death in 1976, plunging the actor’s life into a substance abuse and self-denial fueled crisis he’s still enduring as the camera rolls.

Horvath works at the whims of Berger, who is either living in filth in his small Austria apartment, or huffing whispers of residual gas from Seventies jet-set fumes in modern-day Saint-Tropez. Berger insults the director throughout, suggesting the “egoist” and “bourgeois idiot” profile a lesser actor. At one point, the actor even hilariously attempts to fire Horvath from his own project.

By the end of the film, you could lay out a strong case in showing degrees of empathy for Berger, a lonely and virtually broke former idol, who’s clearly yearning for connection he’s ill equipped to receive, partly because of self-deception. One could also explain away Berger as a magnificently craggy and boorish man-child, insufferable beyond annoyance. As usual, his truth lies somewhere between those ends.

The film is equally about Horvath himself as it is about Helmut Berger. Throughout, their relationship comes to the fore, Berger continually asking for the director’s attention in various ways, simultaneously enraptured and spurned. The final explosive scene, as it were, features Horvath capitulating to Berger’s base hungers. Because the depressed Berger’s relatively consistent in self-idolatry and childish fuss, it’s Horvath that must cross barriers meant for his subject.

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Helmut Berger, Actor screens again Thursday, Sept. 29, 10:40pm.

Fantastic Fest 2016 runs Sept. 22-29 at the Alamo South Lamar. Tickets and info at www.fantasticfest.com, and follow our ongoing coverage at austinchronicle.com/fantastic-fest.