Intimacy, Alienation in ‘Worker’

Phillip B. Roth’s “I Was a Jewish Sex Worker” is as funny and outrageous as its title, but at the same time it’s serious and painful. It takes its title from a period in the filmmaker’s life when he worked as an erotic masseur in Manhattan, and Roth includes more graphic glimpses of precisely what this involves than some viewers will feel necessary. (Consider yourself warned.)

Roth, however, is determined that his documentary will be a no-holds-barred quest for self-discovery. It is his attempt to integrate his sexual orientation with his family and his background and to establish a sense of his own identity.

Interestingly, Roth tells us that the knowledge of a camera turned on himself paradoxically gives him the protective distance he needs to explore intimacy in ways that he might never otherwise have attempted. An affair with gay male German filmmaker Rosa von Praunheim has, he says, inspired him to make this film.

However, Roth, who lives up to his own description as tall and good-looking, has a lot more on his mind than sex. He wants to consider the strong personalities of the women in his family he feels have had such a role in shaping him.

Born in Los Angeles, where his parents have not been able to accept his homosexuality, he’s settled in Manhattan in the Lower East Side, where his grandparents once lived. He takes part in traditional gatherings of his mother’s family.

His maternal grandmother, Sylvia Eisen, is a chic, vibrant woman, tough-minded, proud and loving, given to aphorisms but clearly strong enough to try to live up to them. One of his aunts, who’s become like a second mother to him, shocks him, as a gay man and therefore a member of a minority, with her shortsighted, exasperated view of blacks. Although ambivalent about his religious heritage, he seems to very much want to embrace family and be embraced in return.

When he does finally get his mother to sit in front of his camera, all she talks about is her own mother’s increasing expectations of her. Earlier he’s told us that she’s told him that the reality of his homosexuality has “driven her to drink.”

Roth, whose message machine reveals amusing confusions with novelist Philip Roth, saves for the last an interview with his father, a man who acknowledges but cannot accept his son’s sexual orientation. Roth has captured a moment of seemingly unbridgeable alienation between father and son, parent and child, which many will be able to identify with--regardless of sexual orientation.

* Unrated. Times guidelines: It includes moments of fairly graphic sex, although not pornographic in intent. However, the film is strictly for open-minded adult audiences.

‘I Was a Jewish Sex Worker’

A Greycat Films presentation. Writer-producer-director-editor Phillip B. Roth. Camera: James Wentzy, Billy Quinn, Robert Hilferty, Richard Kwietniowski, Roth, Andy Moore, Bernd Schonherr, Sean McDonald. Executive producer James D. Brubacker. Screenplay by Barry Michael Cooper and Jeff Pollack. Cinematographer Tom Priestley Jr. Running time: 1 hour, 15 minutes.

* Exclusively at the Music Hall for one week, 9036 Wilshire Blvd., Beverly Hills, (310) 274-6869.