When it starts, director Al Bailey’s DTF seems like a feature-length episode of The Bachelor in the making. After his wife Charlotte died young in 2014, long-haul pilot Christian searches for love through Tinder dates in cities around the world—all while his friend Bailey (who introduced him to Charlotte 15 years prior) documents the search. Given that potentially cute set-up, it’s surprising to realize in the film’s first few minutes that not only is “Christian” a pseudonym, but that our romantic hero’s face will be blurred and his voice modulated throughout. Though it initially seems like a disastrous choice, as DTF quickly devolves into a depraved documentary about “Christian’s” sex addiction, it becomes clear why Bailey has to hide his friend’s identity.
The film starts innocuously enough when Bailey and crew follow “Christian” to a date with a woman whose face is also blurred. As they film the pair from sidewalks outside of bars or from dozens of feet in the distance while the couple shares beers on the beach, filmmaker and subject’s roles seem clearly established: Bailey is the somewhat obnoxious wingman and “Christian” is the nice guy putting up with his obnoxious friend.
Things take a turn, however, when the production team follow “Christian” to his next meeting with the same woman the next morning and he suddenly storms off after talking with her briefly. We assume that it’s because the woman asked to talk without cameras and the production team showed up anyway, but it’s quickly revealed that “Christian’s” outburst was caused by the discovery that he may have contracted HIV from the woman. It’s a shocking turn and, as the film’s producer Neil Jarem-Croft complains in the next scene, threatens to derail the documentary just as it’s begun. Though “Christian” and the production eventually decide to go on, what the incident does is to put the audience’s sympathies squarely with “Christian.” So, it’s even more shocking, then, to see how quickly and irrevocably he squanders it.
On his next stop in Tijuana, “Christian” promises that he won’t date while he waits for his test results, after a few drinks, however, he insists on looking for not just a date, but sex. “They’ve probably got the HIV anyway,” “Christian” jokes as he prowls through the streets. Finally, despite Bailey’s protests, they enter a bar where “Christian” quickly begins to lead two sex workers to a back room. Though Bailey tries to drag his friend away, “Christian” calls him a baby and keeps walking. It’s disgusting behavior, but it’s only made worse when we hear “Christian,” still on mic, ask if he can have sex with the women without a condom.
All of this happens within the film’s first 15 minutes and while it is repellant enough that some viewers may stop watching then and there, things only get more horrifying. Indeed, as “Christian’s” behavior becomes more erratic and toxic, the production is forced to change the film’s focus. However, the film’s problem isn’t that the documentary is evolving into something Al repeatedly laments they didn’t intend, it’s that he and the production team are both too slow to pivot once it becomes clear “Christian” isn’t interested in dating and ill-equipped to explore the nuances of sex addiction once it becomes their subject.
In an attempt to help “Christian” get control over his addiction, Bailey and crew convince him to try using a sex toy while watching VR porn as a replacement for hook-ups. It doesn’t work and Bailey’s resulting bafflement at “Christian’s” explanation that what gets him off is the newness and pursuit of real sex is testament to how desperately the film needs an outside and more educated perspective. Perhaps if Bailey and the production team had stopped fixating on getting interviews with higher-ups at Tinder or other pilots, they could have thought to ask a sex addiction counselor how to help curb “Christian’s” behavior. Or–at the very least–to inform them that trying to refocus “Christian’s” sexual behavior from real women to masturbation doesn’t actually address the underlying addiction. As Bailey and the production team throw one ill-advised activity after another in “Christian’s” path, the more woefully uninformed they seem and it’s frustrating that they both fail to do enough research or provide the context and information a good documentary should.
Admittedly, part of the reason DTF‘s makers are so unable to pivot is that Bailey seems to believe that he can change his friend’s behavior simply by reasoning with him. As Bailey storms off in Hong Kong when “Christian” brings two women for them to share or warns him that he only has one strike left before a truly disastrous trip in Denver at the film’s end, it’s clear Bailey doesn’t realize how much things have escalated. On some level, that’s because, as he mentions while interviewing “Christian” in Hong Kong, he’s seeing this side of his friend for the first time, but it’s also that Bailey’s filming of his friend’s depravity has become almost his own masochistic addiction.
Though it would be easy to characterize “Christian” and Bailey’s eventual codependence as mutual exploitation, DTF is also, unwittingly, a blistering expose of insidious boys-will-be-boys misogyny. As Bailey worries at one point, the production team, “could all end up looking like absolute twats,” and they do. But it’s not because they repeatedly allow themselves to be tricked by “Christian,” but because they repeatedly treat his behavior as harmless until things get extreme. In most documentaries, you could probably dismiss that behavior as the filmmakers maintaining emotional distance from their subject, but that excuse becomes irrelevant during the scenes that take place in Las Vegas.
Things first escalate when “Christian” spikes Bailey’s drink with MDMA but only get worse from there. Rather than take Bailey back to the room to sleep it off, the camera crew follows “Christian” as he drags a barely conscious Bailey to a private room in a strip club. As “Christian” tells the stripper to put her breasts in the now-unconscious Bailey’s face, we can hear the cameramen discussing whether they should stop this, but instead, at least one of them leaves the room in disgust. We never see how Bailey makes it back to the hotel, instead, the next shot is of him nearly naked and passed out face down on his hotel bed as “Christian” first pulls down his underwear for the camera and then covers him in shaving cream—cameraman Nathan Codrington laughing uncomfortably all the while. It’s not until “Christian” rubs the sex toy he used earlier–still presumably in the condition he left it–that Codrington finally puffs his chest out and reacts.
Though that incident is perhaps the most extreme example of the filmmakers’ failure to understand the concept of consent, DTF is really fueled by that misunderstanding. From Bailey’s early boundary pushing to “Christian’s” increasingly deplorable behavior, none of the men involved seem to care about anybody else’s boundaries but their own. Admittedly, there’s a moment near the film’s end where Bailey is confronted by his complicity when “Christian” reveals something so heinously villainous that violence erupts, but that’s just the final straw in a movie that, for many viewers, will be frustrating and triggering to the point that DTF becomes unwatchable. For the rest, it will be like watching a slow-motion train wreck: horrible to look at, but impossible to tear your eyes away.
I loved this review of the film and agree wholeheartedly. So gross! I feel bad for all of them