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Pity poor British filmmaker Chris Waitt. Over the years, girlfriends have dumped him by email, in answerphone and text messages, even killed him off as a character in a novel.
Hence Waitt's debut feature A Complete History of My Sexual Failures, which is included in the upcoming New Zealand International Film Festival, a comic documentary in which he reviews his life of amorous woe.
Waitt, 38, has been given his marching orders by a suspiciously large number of intelligent, attractive and sophisticated women. Ostensibly casting himself as a lamentable lover, in this funny film he's really making himself seem the world's cuddliest catch. It worked for Woody Allen over several decades, and Waitt's exercise in narcissism may do the trick for him, too.
A Complete History is quite a performance. Waitt maintains the pretence throughout that his film is a documentary and, as far as one can see, many if not all of the exes he interviews (or who angrily refuse to be interviewed) are women Waitt really has dated. His likeable mother - who has little truck with his brattish self-pity - also appears to really be his mother. Mind you, the end titles admit that some of the film's encounters had to be "reconstituted"; make of that what you will.
The more real others appear to be, the less you believe in its star. A bedraggled straw-haired stick, Waitt behaves like a cartoonish overgrown slacker.
If his film is a hit, Waitt is doomed, like Michael Moore, to spend the rest of his career wearing the same clothes, and the same persona. A skilled comedian, he sustains the same air of puppyish "Who, me?" bemusement whether being berated on the phone by his disgruntled producer or having his scrotum wrenched by dominatrix Mistress Maisie ("Hugs I don't do!"), while he hangs from a crucifix. Halfway, Waitt swerves from his sentimental life into a farcical essay on his alleged erection problems.
This shift seems designed mainly to motivate an extended gonzo stunt in which Waitt, overdosed on Viagra (apparently), starts propositioning women in London streets (apparently) and ends up being arrested (apparently).
The film increasingly resembles a set-up job - which, perversely, Waitt turns to his advantage. Just when we think he's led us into the furthest reaches of Candid Camera-land, he switches register and gives us a dose of genuine emotion ("apparently", I could add again, but this time I'm not so sure).
He introduces us to the One Who Got Away, a woman named Vicky who seems genuinely rueful about her history with Waitt. As the ex-lovers face each other in this clever and entertaining film, their eyes well up, to moving effect although I wouldn't swear that Waitt isn't holding a sliced onion just out of shot.
The Independent A Complete History of My Sexual Failures screens as part of the 40th Auckland International Film Festival: July 13, 14, 16. (www.nzff.co.nz)
