>>REVIEW
Directed by Caveh Zehadi
Alliance Atlantis Home Video, 2006
Confessions used to matter. Fessing up to a secret shame used to be reserved for intimate moments or for matters of religious significance, but the soul-baring confessional has been devalued of late. Blame reality shows and their video diaries, or the dreaded collection of teen angst known as the blogosphere. With projects like PostSecret, a mailing address for anonymous postcards that turn confessions into art, it seems that shame has become a matter of pride.
It’s inevitable, then, that a movie like Caveh Zahedi’s I Am a Sex Addict would appear. An autobiographical documentary, Sex Addict basically consists of Zahedi lecturing the audience about his depravity without any hesitation or embarrassment. He makes a lot of admissions along the way: he admits to hiring prostitutes and frequenting brothels, for example. He admits, in one of the many moments where the film shatters the fourth wall, that his film didn’t have the budget to shoot in Paris, so San Francisco will have to be French enough. He even admits to a nasty habit of masturbating in church confessionals. Zehadi is not a well man, but at least he admits to it.
His approach to filmmaking is equally unhinged. Zahedi mixes his narration with cute animations, documentary footage and dramatic re-enactments; in the latter, he’s perfectly willing to break character and speak directly to the camera, realism be damned. Throwing layers of artifice on top of what is essentially a film about honesty is a dangerous move, but Zahedi’s easy charm and childlike look of perpetual bewilderment manage to make it seem natural.
Those same qualities are also the only thing keeping Zahedi from coming off as a complete cad. Anyone worried that a movie about a man’s sexual proclivities would come off as pure braggadocio should be comforted that Zahedi is more than willing to let his hypocrisy and callousness shine through in nearly every scene. By the time he drags his girlfriend to a German brothel to watch him get together with a prostitute, Zahedi should be entirely irredeemable, but it’s difficult not to feel at least a little sympathy for him.
More than anything, I Am a Sex Addict is about a man addicted to confessing. Zehadi doesn’t just sleep with prostitutes, he talks about it endlessly. He tells his girlfriends about his fantasies and apologizes incessantly after he acts on them. And then he tells the audience about that. It’s as if he feels that by confessing to every last indiscretion, he’ll create something profound, but by the end it’s unclear if his unflagging honesty is the result of remarkable bravery or remarkable obliviousness. Unfortunately, even after 100 minutes of revelations, Zahedi doesn’t really say anything that wasn’t already said in the five-word title. |
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