I Am a Sex Addict (Movie Review)

Have you ever sat in a cafe for two hours while an old friend updates you on the last 12 years of his life? Is your friend one of the smartest, funniest and charmingly flawed people on the planet? Caveh Zahedi's film I Am a Sex Addict conjures these feelings exactly, although the story is one you may not have heard before: an autobiographical look at an addiction to visiting prostitutes that has destroyed almost all of the filmmaker's relationships. I Am a Sex Addict is a heavy story told lightly, and its style is as engaging as its substance.

Zahedi's sex addiction began on the streets of Paris in 1983. But, he tells us, he doesn't have enough money to shoot in Paris, so he's going to shoot this movie in San Francisco, but please pretend that it's Paris. To help us pretend, a smoking man wearing a beret carries a baguette through the frame. And, by the way, Zahedi is 23 years old in this scene, so his bald spot is quickly filled in with spray-on hair. In this manner, Zahedi often breaks the reality of the movie to provide us with jokes and little bits of inside information, with hilarious and engaging effect. Zahedi's lighthearted tone and jocular style keep us aloft and rooting for him as we watch an addiction nearly destroy his life. He holds nothing back from us, that he is overpoweringly turned on by a prostitute urging him to rape her, or that he wants a girlfriend to watch him having sex with another. Arguing with this girlfriend over money - she wants to spend it on booze, he wants to spend it on a blowjob - brings him to the eventual realization that he is an addict just as surely as she is.

Zahedi blends documentary footage, re-enactments, and even animation into a hybridized film style that is self-aware without being messy. The principal actor, Zahedi plays himself well. Most of the other actors are serviceable without being great, and even the more flawed performances tend to add to the amateur chic. Sex Addict will make you think in new ways about the intersection of storytelling and film, and it's lots of fun to watch.

Bottom Line:
See it.