A complete history of my sexual failures tells the story of Chris Wait, a 30-something gen xer who doesn’t seem to have grown up, who wants to know what the hell is wrong with him after being dumped by every girlfriend he’s ever had.

Wait’s had something like 15 or 20 girlfriends, and in this documentary-style movie he attempts to track down each one of them to find out why he was dumped, and what he can do to improve his performance as a boyfriend. He calls this exercise his “project”.

Of course you should know that Chris has a number of challenges:

• He’s never had a real job, and has no money
• He’s completely unreliable
• His flat looks like a dump, no really
• He is completely insensitive to his ex-girlfriend’s needs
• And, to top it off, he’s been suffering impotence for the previous three years.

At first he doesn’t have much luck tracking down his old girlfriends, with an office manager threatening him after he turns up at an office unannounced to talk to an old girlfriend. Other girlfriends slam the door in his face or turn down his requests. His luck starts to change when his long-suffering mum, who’s stayed friendly with the families in his home town, arranges a meeting with one of Chris’s early girlfriends.

Chris’s quest for self-knowledge seems to spiral from there, finding out that he was dropped by one girlfriend because he couldn’t consummate the relationship, while another dropped him because she was concerned he had “mental health issues”. Another girlfriend describes him as the “worst boyfriend she ever had”.

The movie has a couple of Borat-like moments, including:

• Chris singing a song that includes the line “I’d like to #### every girl in the world” to a therapist
• Chris asking random women to have sex with him after he takes some Viagra (he doesn’t get lucky, by the way, and he’s eventually detained by Police).

And while a big chunk of this movie consists of stunts, there is also a serious side when Chris discovers that his ex-fiancé, for whom he still has feelings for, is pregnant.

While it’s hard to know much of this movie was staged and how much was really spontaneous, it’s certainly entertaining, and Chris does eventually come to some understanding of why he’s in the situation he is, thanks to some insightful comments from his mum.

The cinema season starts on March 19 at Dendy Newtown, Sydney, State Cinema, Hobart and Schonell Cinema, Brisbane. It starts on March 26 at Cinema Nova in Melbourne.

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