Private Practices: The Story of a Sex Surrogate

This early film by Kirby Dick gives its viewers unprecedented access to the now-defunct, but once voguish, if never totally reputable, practice of sex surrogacy. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, surrogates offered sex therapy, which included anything from light touching to full intercourse, to men incapable of developing healthy, sexual relationships with women. Following the behaviorists, these therapists and semi-psychologists argued, persuasively in my opinion, that information gets a patient only so far. At some point, the patient needs to practice what he's learned in real-life situations, with real, living people. Unfortunately for these men, that is precisely the problem.

Dick's documentary takes a fairly minimalist approach to its subject, with non-invasive interviews, generous footage of surrogate sessions, and a handful of tense, challenging encounters between the surrogate and her father, the surrogate and her own therapist, and one patient and his ex-wife. The sparse style works organically both to stifle any voyeuristic pleasure the viewer might feel while watching the sessions and to close the distance between patient and audience, as well as to emphasize the torment and loneliness of the poor men, all the while quietly eliminating all unnecessary or extravagant flourishes. The result is a mature, restrained, delicate, bizarre introduction to a probably useful, likely difficult, and definitely dead experiment in social tolerance.

Given the extraordinary potential here, I feel obligated to give the movie a middling B-. At seventy-something minutes, it's just too brief to explore its subject to anybody's satisfaction. By the end, I was emotionally aroused, all sympathetic and sad, and whatnot, but also very frustrated, left with a desire for more. Maybe that's a fine, self-reflexive touch? A clever nod to the Heisenbergian nature of documentary procedure? A coup de foudre exchange? No, probably not.