When I first wrote about A Complete History of My Sexual Failures, based solely on the film’s Sundance catalog synopsis, I pegged it as “like Sherman’s March, but British, and 1/3 as long, and seemingly not at all concerned with vague parallels to 19th century history!” Having seen the film with an extremely enthusiastic press corps, I can confirm that Chris Waitt’s debut feature *is* a little like Sherman’s March, but the ancestral lineage of this undeniable crowd-pleaser is more complicated than I could have guessed. At its best, this heavily constructed slice of auto-videography is a lot like a Nick Broomfield remake of Four Eyed Monsters, except with a budget for car commercial cast-off source cues and an extremely problematic relationship with the kind of fearless personal honesty that Arin Crumley and Susan Buice have turned into a brand.

The hapless 30-something director, with his ever-present stubble, saggy ripped jeans and dishwater moptop, is a dead ringer for Kurt Cobain circa 1994 (I would have pegged this as “retro” affectation, if every other character on screen hadn’t made a derisive comment about the director/star’s lack of grooming acumen and style). Speaking directly to the camera from a home office resembling a teenager’s bedroom, Waitt explains that, as his girlfriend of three weeks has just dumped him, he’s decided to track down as many former flames as possible and interview each, in order to figure out what he’s been doing wrong and hopefully figure out how to find true love/avoid future dumpings.

Sexual Failures is, first and foremost, a comedy, but it’s got something a bit more interesting and cerebral cooking just underneath the surface. Waitt seems to enter many of his interviews as if he thinks there’s a chance he’s going to get laid, and when confronted with each ex-girlfriend’s mix of hostility and indifference (the dumper’s luxury), he never seems to get used to the disappointment. It soon becomes clear that this is not at all about working towards the future, but burying himself in the past.

He interviews a girl he “dated” when he was eleven. He attaches a school boy portrait of himself to his MySpace profile. He relies way too much on the support of his mom, to the point where an ex he hasn’t seen in a decade comments that there’s something weird going on with mother and son. The phrase “buy milk” appears at least twice in the film, both times scrawled in Waitt’s handwriting. I’m not sure what THAT means, exactly, but I’m choosing it to read it as a side effect of some kind of latent infantile suckling fantasy.

There’s something really fascinating about the concept of reversion at work here, and if this was a narrative, Waitt’s Achilles heel of serial impotence might feel like an appropriate way for the character to outwardly manifest his fear of growing old and settling into a mature relationship. But as an ostensible non-fiction portrait of a real person’s search for self knowledge and closure on past failures, too many of Waitt’s experiments to combat both sexual and romantic incompetency feel like performed rather than lived.
There are exceptions––a date that ends with gloriously awkward pillow talk and a teary confrontation with The One That Got Away certainly feel real––but there’s an awful lot of material here that seems to have been contrived for the benefit of the camera. There are two particularly fatal sequences––a bit of post-Viagra overdose slapstick street theater, a cringe-inducing session with a dominatrix––which feel devoid of anything genuine. It’s Jackass stuff––except without the anarchy, and definitely without the rapid-fire brevity. It’s an attempt to engineer an artificial rock bottom to ensure that the film’s happy ending will feel fully earned. Instead, it feels like the end game of under-confident filmmaking.

Though Waitt has no qualms showing what seem like genuine false starts and non-starter interviews, the clue that this is not the most spontaneous of personal projects comes early in the film, when he takes a call on camera from his irate producer. Aside from the fact that the call seems to have been rehearsed (if not tightly scripted), it’s an interesting 180 on the phone call that Arin gets towards the end of Four Eyed Monsters. In the earlier movie, a filmmaker receives a call rewarding his willingness to break down barriers between his real personal life and his art. In Waitt’s film, the filmmaker receives a call punishing him for attempting to pass off his dismal failure of a personal life as art. And from a commercial stand point, you can sort of see his point. Maybe, several years post YouTube, it’s just not enough anymore to train a camera on life; maybe the market demands that life be lived with the camera in mind.

I guess it goes without saying that I hope this is not the case. Sexual History is certainly a conventionally entertaining film––slap a blur on the dominatrix scene and some heavy bleeping, and it could play on any MTV-owned network––but it’s also so desperate to please a crowd that it seems all too eager to dispense with truth.