Pornorama wraps up

by Bénédicte Prot

07/11/2006 - Some would say that the Holocaust was the single most extreme form of sexual perversion, but Marc Rothemund’s Pornorama, which finished shooting last week in Munich, will surprise audiences who know the director from his double Golden Bear-winning and Oscar-nominated film, Sophie Scholl: The Final Days [trailer].

With his new film, Rothemund returns to the comedies he made before Sophie Scholl, in particular Love Scenes From Planet Earth (1997-98) and Ants in the Pants (a hit at the 1999 German box office with 1.7m admissions).

Like Sophie, Pornorama is a historical film but set in the present to depict Munich’s porn industry in the 1960s. His heroes are two brothers who could not be more different: Bennie (Tom Schilling of Napola and Atomised [trailer, film focus]), who accepts to film student protests for the police, and Freddie (Benno Fürmann of Christian Petzold’s Ghosts), who persuades him to make another genre of low-budget films.

The two are flanked by Karoline Herfurth, the young girl whose olfactory memory haunts Grenouille in Tom Tykwer’s Perfume [trailer] and whose raw energy left Rothemund particularly impressed.

Despite the provocative title, the production studio Constantin Film Produktion – who previously worked with the director on Ants in the Pants – have emphasised that Pornorama is above all a romantic comedy, with classical references to, among others, Oswalt Kolle and Go For It, Baby by May Spils (1967).

Constantin will also handle the film’s release sometime in 2007.

(Translated from French)