“WILL YOU SUCK ME?” That’s what you can expect to hear, over and over.
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Guys will prattle on forever about the women they claim to have laid, but they keep mum about anything that smacks of the perverse. Do male friends watch porno into the deep night, get jerked off at massage parlors, or bring escorts into their condos for kinky S&M? I don’t know: they’re not telling, and neither do they know anything sexually creepy about me. So give filmmaker Caveh Zahedi credit for making the self-confessional comedy I Am a Sex Addict, which is showing all week at the Brattle. Zahedi holds nothing back, detailing, and often gently mocking, his years and years of frequenting prostitutes. He’s a little fellow with big, expressive eyes and a talent, even in the most compromised sexual situations, for comic mugging. You’re tempted to compare him to Woody Allen, especially with his blind idiocy in relationships, his mind-boggling blunders in love. Allen makes an occasional smutty joke, then draws to a discreet halt. Have we ever seen his woody? Zahedi catapults over the line of good taste. Sometimes the small, squalid runt is plunging away, but more often he’s getting oral gratification from a hooker. If you’re going to watch I Am a Sex Addict, you’ll have to get used to the sordid sight, the unpleasant sound, of Zahedi howling and baying with joy because his cock is in a hooker’s mouth. His most-repeated line of dialogue: “Will you suck me?”
When not enmeshed with ladies of the night, he negotiates, badly, through a trio of girlfriends. I Am a Sex Addict is a flashback movie. As he’s about to be married for the third time, Zahedi, in a tuxedo, pauses to tell the camera woeful tales of love past. These are acted out, low-budget indie style (San Francisco standing in for Paris, etc.), with the wrinkled, late-40ish filmmaker playing himself at earlier, studlier times.
Tale one: in the late 1970s, he leaves his American girlfriend to live with, and marry, a French one, Caroline (Rebecca Lord). Tale two: in the 1980s, he meets a nice girl, Christa (Emily Morse), at UCLA film school. Tale three; in the early 1990s, he hooks up in Austin with Devin (Amanda Henderson), a mushroom-eating sexual free spirit. All three relationships are marred by Zahedi’s obsessive desire for prostitutes, and by his spill-all credo that he must be truthful to his significant others.
Well, frankness hurts. Truth damages. Only Devin seems to regard his abnormal needs as normal. That’s because, as he slowly finds out, she’s screwed up herself, a self-hating alcoholic. The most harrowing, effective scene in the movie is the one in which Zahedi takes Devin to a Munich brothel, a night ending in tears, accusations, and near-suicide.
Do you want to watch this stuff for 99 minutes? I made it through a DVD screener, plowing on because of the moments of wit and insight alongside Zahedi’s stupidities. I’m a guy: guys are dumb. My wife gave up after an hour. “I find him totally obnoxious and want nothing more to do with him,” she said, retiring to bed to read the New Yorker.
