Get this guy a blow-up doll

When I was growing up in NYC, all the girls I knew would have most likely had a word for this guy: a creep. Not attractive in any way, not even in a Woody Allen or R Crumb intellectual/brilliant/funny sort of way, Caveh is repugnant to look at, with his scrawny body, weird face and even weirder ideas about relationships. I found it hard to believe that the women depicted in the movie (and shown in their real-life identities as well) would be attracted to him in the first place. This having been said, the film was interesting.

He does attempt to explore areas that have not really been dealt with in this particular way before - how some people (women, in this movie) try to be open-minded with their boyfriend's behavior and confessions about sex but in reality, they can't actually accept it. This has been shown before, of course, in other movies, but it's the way it's depicted here that is quite original. And it rings true: I've learned that in intimate relationships of any kind, it's quite possibly impossible to be thoroughly forth-coming (no pun intended). It was mind-boggling to watch Caveh perversely attempting to be a hundred percent honest - his version of it, anyway - and how it always wound up being not only destructive to every relationship, but, even worse, it came across as being cruel, obtuse and self-indulgent.

There are funny parts in the film though. What I thought was the most hilarious was how, whenever he would approach a hooker, he would ask "How much" and when she told him, he would say, "I have to think about it." Then he would ask other hookers what they were charging, as if he were comparison shopping. This struck me as being really humorous. I understood that he was also getting off on merely talking to them, of course, and he was indeed not sure if he was gonna go through with it many times, but it was the comparison-shopping factor that made me laugh.

More seriously, it was very revealing to see how his thoughts and feelings on the conscious level versus the unconscious and subconscious levels regarding women were completely opposite. Throughout the film, he keeps talking about transcending negative feelings, like jealousy for instance, but yet he finds that when the tables are turned by one of his female lovers, he is consumed by jealousy and transcendence is nowhere in sight. He throws these words out like the can be simplistically applied, without deep inner work, expecting things from others that he is sadly inequipped to give, inadvertently making him a hypocrite.

More along these lines, he states in the film that he respects women, he's a feminist, blah blah blah, but yet his behavior toward them as shown in the course of the proceedings is criminally selfish. At one point, he even says he looked at one of the women he was pursuing for sex, saw her soul, and shockingly realized she was a real person, with real needs and feelings of her own. Welcome to the human race, Caveh.