A Complete History of My Sexual Failures

Thursday night-

A Complete History of My Sexual Failures

- in which despondent film-maker Chris Waitt, feeling like Britain's Most Dumped after yet another relationship breakdown, decides to track down every girl he's ever had any kind of involvement with and find out why they ditched him.

I would hazard a guess that most people have thought of doing this at some point in their lives. Or maybe it's a guy thing. A dumped guy thing. While writers like Nick Hornby, Ben Elton and Nick Earls have explored this territory through fiction, Chris Waitt decided to do it for real.

His attempts to reconnect with his past and fix his present take him through an odyssey of awkward scenarios. Chris unshamedly puts himself in cringe worthy situations, from confrontations with hostile exes, to blind dates, to begging for sex on the street, to a visit to a dominatrix's dungeon to have his attitude to women "corrected". It's rough and ready film making, with many sequences filmed on webcam, or "video diary" style by Chris himself, but it never fails to be amusing.

However, as riotously funny as this film is, it doesn't sit quite right. Partly, it's a dirty feeling at so much Schadenfreude in one hit. But it's also because the film raises questions that it neglects to answer in its pursuit of laughs.

For starters, after ten minutes watching Waitt on camera, the question the audience wants to know is not why all his former girlfriends broke up with him but why they were with him in the first place. Chris Waitt is essentially Shaggy from Scooby Doo but without a cool talking dog. To add to this, the camera constantly shows him at his worst for comic effect, which makes him seem caricatured, the embodiment of the Undateable Man. Clearly he isn't that - he does have, after all, a very long list of former girlfriends - and there are other way in which his onscreen persona doesn't add up. The character you see on screen is a man with a painful lack of self-awareness. Yet this same man apparently directed a film which knowingly highlights this lack. There is something calculated about the way Waitt presents, which means that for all the personal material in the film (and there is some very brave personal material) I still felt like I was watching a performance.

Complete History is Waitt's first documentary, his previous work having been mostly in comedy. This background clearly rubs off on this film. It is like a romance version of Jackass, drawing on the same "hey, watch me do dumb shit" appeal. It does succeed very well on that level - it has been a long time since I sat in a cinema with a crowd reacting to what they see on screen so energetically, whether it was belly laughs or groans of horror. Still, I can't help but feel that there is a dimension of character exploration which this film only dips its toe in when it really needs to dive.