I Am a Sex Addict (2006)

into a magic trick: if he admits every dirty urge, perhaps he can remain virtuous—or at least avoid feeling guilty. With the freer, more sexually adventurous Devin, he convinces himself that an open relationship will solve everything, only to discover that permission cannot turn compulsion into intimacy. Women come and go, marriages buckle, and each fresh start becomes another lap around the same grubby track. Zahedi stages all this through re-enactments, home movies, voice-over, cheap animation and constant interruptions in which he discusses reluctant actresses, missing money, false locations and the awkward business of filming simulated blowjobs. The trick is that his radical honesty never guarantees innocence. He can be funny, pathetic, manipulative and genuinely remorseful within the same minute, leaving you unsure whether you want to hug him, slap him or confiscate his wallet. Beneath the Woody Allen-style neurosis and bargain-basement cheek is a bleakly accurate portrait of addiction: not endless pleasure, but repetitive humiliation, rationalisation and damage inflicted on people who were foolish enough to love the addict. As Caveh moves towards support meetings and the possibility of finally breaking the cycle, the comedy grows sadder, and his glib little confessions begin to carry real emotional weight.

The story stretches from early-1980s Paris through the scruffy American indie-film world of the following decades, with San Francisco supplying both the film’s natural habitat and, hilariously, much of its cut-price “Europe.” Zahedi will show you an ordinary San Francisco street, declare that it is standing in for Paris because he cannot afford the real thing, then later pop up sheepishly near the Eiffel Tower. Some material was also filmed around Los Angeles, but there is no glossy travelogue sheen anywhere; apartments, cars, sidewalks, massage parlours and anonymous rooms form the scenery of Caveh’s private purgatory. That homemade digital roughness is the point. The film feels like an intimate video diary colliding with a bedroom farce and a twelve-step confession, complete with visible seams and embarrassing production mishaps. Its vibe is candid, neurotic and dangerously funny—less champagne-and-satin erotica than the morning-after smell of stale upholstery, bad decisions and a man realising that his favourite fantasy has been eating his life.

The women are considerably more alluring than the film allows Caveh to be. Rebecca Lord brings cool French beauty and a knowingly erotic charge to the role of Caroline—and to the film’s cheeky doubling games—while Emily Morse gives Christa an appealing reserve that makes Caveh’s demands seem even more exhausting. Amanda Henderson is the standout as Devin: earthy, attractive and sexually open without becoming a male-fantasy cardboard cut-out, she gives the relationship warmth, intelligence and a bruised sense of history. There is nudity, strong sexual language and plenty of simulated activity, particularly Caveh’s beloved blowjobs, but anyone expecting polished pornography will be in for a limp surprise. The women can be sexy; the sex rarely is. Zahedi deliberately presents it as clumsy, transactional and faintly ridiculous—a procession of exposed flesh, desperate moaning and moral hangovers that plays more like an anti-aphrodisiac than a wank film.

Just moments before his third wedding, Zahedi relates with utter sincerity and astonishing candor his obsession with prostitutes. He retraces his romantic and sexual history, including his ideological commitment to open relationships, that led to two disastrous marriages and several very pissed off ex-girlfriends.