Jonathan Agassi Saved My Life review ★★★★☆ by Ifan Llewelyn
The adult film industry has been the subject of countless documentaries. Just take a scroll through your Netflix home page and you’re sure to stumble across a few, from After Porn Ends following performers after they leave the industry, to the Rashida Jones-produced Hot Girls Wanted shedding light on amateur porn, both of which have had several sequels. There seems to be an insatiable appetite for peeping behind the business of selling sex. Documentary filmmaker Tomer Heymann‘s Jonathan Agassi Saved My Life singles in on one performer in particular for a character study that’s compelling and undoubtedly distressing.
We meet Jonathan Agassi behind the scenes of a gay club night where he’s preparing to perform a live show. Stroking his erect member, in a pair of garage overalls he catches up to his co-star who he hasn’t seen in a while. He sits playing with himself as his co-star reveals that he’s recently back from a short hiatus after losing his sister to cancer. The two go out into the crowd and get fucking, with Agassi being drilled by a hand-held automatic dildo. It’s these slippages between pornographic fantasy and real-life that this documentary toils with as we see the troubled man behind world-famed gay porn superstar.
Born Elkana Yonatan Langer to Isreali parents, we soon learn that it wasn’t an easy childhood for Agassi. His father abandoned his mother soon after he was born, and the family were left to fend for themselves in the suburbs of Tel Aviv. Entering the adult film industry at the age of 24, he took the industry by storm with Lucas Entertainment starring in some of their most successful porn flicks. We follow him almost a decade in when his life has been entirely consumed by the industry. He flies from club event, to film set, to meetings with “private clients”, landing back in his mother’s small Tel Aviv flat on his downtime.
Though lacking in the crafted narrative and stylistic choices that brought porn star documentary Rocco acclaim back in 2016, the filmmaker’s undecorated approach brings a frank attitude to the subject matter. The events of the years spent filming Jonathan Agassi are presented chronologically and plainly. No overt narrative is carved out from the footage, but rather it’s stitched together to plainly portray the harrowing downward spiral of gay porn star reaching the end of his tether.
What emerges is the real love shared between Agassi and his mother who’s exceptionally supportive of his career. Curled up on the family sofa, he excitedly shows her his new film’s opening scene. It later becomes evident that the two of them have clung on to each other in the face of Agassi’s father’s brutality. Their relationship is devastatingly co-dependent, but there’s a real beauty in their devotion to each other.
Jonathan Agassi Saved My Life is out on DVD and on-demand with Q&A screenings in London on 4th and 5th December.
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