JONATHAN AGASSI SAVED MY LIFE
Eight years in the making, Jonathan Agassi Saved My Life tells the story of a porn star’s decline. Joseph Brennan reviews the film and speaks to director, Tomer Heymann.
New film, Jospeh Brennan reviews.
Many films discuss what porn, prostitution and drugs do to people, but we wanted to show it, not talk about it, and we had a hero who was willing to go all the way,” says Tomer Heymann, the director of Jonathan Agassi Saved My Life, talking to me from Israel.
As a researcher of porn myself, I approached Heymann’s 2018 documentary about the fall of a gay porn star from my own viewing position, namely, as an authority on porn. This position, it turns out, made my viewing experience an especially sobering and, at times, uncomfortable one.
“There is definitely a ‘shock value’ for most audiences,” Heymann agrees. “This movie is hard to watch and it brings with it a lot of eccentric, explicit, sensual and emotional weight. It can be too much to handle.”
Before being tasked with reviewing this film,
I knew of Jonathan Agassi but only through the academic work of my colleagues. Men Of Israel, Agassi’s first feature, which catapulted him to superstardom, became an instant classic on its release by Lucas Entertainment in 2009. It has been “read” by porn scholars at length for its significance as the first all-Israeli gay porn film, and the personal significance of this film to Agassi and others is clear in the documentary.
My previous knowledge of Agassi was informed by discussion of him by my peers at various times over the eight years that this documentary was being made.
Before watching the film for this review, I recollected the scholarship of one of my peers, Brandon Arroyo, who drew out a blog post by Agassi for academic scrutiny. In this particular post, Agassi had detailed his sexcapades in a
Montréal sauna, which Arroyo had celebrated as a clever move by the porn star to entice his readers via the belief that a visit to a sauna near them may yield similar encounters with a star. In other words, that the post was a tantalising, “porn fantasy come to life” that served to benefit fans, saunas and Agassi’s profile alike.
But this background knowledge quickly discredited itself as I viewed Jonathan Agassi Saved My Life, and I was confronted with the man beneath the persona. The film did this by capturing something tangible about him, some essence that reached beyond the fleshy surface of a well-known porn star. In short, Jonathan Agassi Saved My Life, like all good documentary cinema, humanises Agassi in a way that, really, research should but rarely does.
“This film is very specifically about Jonathan,” Heymann tells me. “It is about a hole in his soul that he filled with sex and drugs.” But also, the film provides an “intimate look into a unique person with a unique life.
It is about the relationship between a mother and her son who courageously redefine family concepts. It is about a lonely person who seeks love and meaning but is drawn into a destructive lifestyle that reveals the dark reality of his extreme fantasies that mask a great denial. It is real and it is about life.”
It is about a lonely person who seeks love but… the reality of his extreme fantasies masks a great denial.
The documentary starts at the top: Agassi at the height of his fame, accepting the award for Best Actor at the 3rd Annual HustlaBall Awards in Berlin in 2011. Heymann and his camera then remain with the star, and we bear witness to a surprising descent from the limelight and into addiction, including a turbulent relationship with his father and the safe harbour that is a mother’s love.
The brilliance of this in-depth cinema is in the editing of eight years of footage, and its success equally attributable to the masterful hand of Heymann and the bravery of Agassi and his family, who invited the director in. “The quality of the film is concerned with Jonathan’s human essence,” Heymann says.
Heymann’s mastery is particularly on show in the film’s opening scene, which captures the complexity of this performer’s time in the porn and sex industries, and hints of a life beyond Jonathan Agassi, the character, and towards the essential role of family. It is, after all, his mother, Anna, and her enduring love for her son that beats at the heart of this film. Anna is the fallen porn god’s ultimate redeemer.
In the pre-title sequence, the story opens with Agassi arriving for a live sex show based on the fantasy of horny straight men fucking in a garage. But before we get to see the performance – and don’t worry, there is plenty of fucking to see throughout the 106-minute film – Agassi catches up with his co-star backstage. With both men dressed in their garage shop overalls and their hard dicks out, Agassi’s co-star confides that he no longer does porn due to the impact that losing his sister to cancer has had on his life. Agassi continues to stroke his own cock as he expresses his condolences. Then they head out together for their show. The fucking is overlaid with sorrowful, techno music that, like our stars, is alienated from the fucking taking place. The impact of drugs are already plain in Agassi’s performance.
“Jonathan is like the White Rabbit in Alice In Wonderland,” Heymann tells me. “He jumps into the rabbit hole and we jump in after him… Jonathan took me to one of the backstages of the porn industry. I was shocked to discover, and closely experience, the aspects of live sex shows and porn making.”
There is a strong sense, after viewing this film, that the studio that had employed him as an exclusive model should have done more to help him during his addiction. Jonathan has publicly stated as much since his retirement from porn a few years back. Instead, his contract was cancelled, increasing his sense of desperation. Surely a greater duty of care is owed to the men who face the pressures of porn stardom, among these, the profit-driven expectation that they transition to bareback. The documentary explores this with regard to Agassi’s final scenes for Lucas Entertainment.
“Jonathan allowed us to go all the way with him and to experience but also reflect on the consequences of all these abuses,” Heymann says. “At one point, the border between his private and professional life is so unclear, it is almost like he is merging with his image as a porn star and he abandons his well being and self-care.”
After viewing Jonathan Agassi Saved My Life, I revisited that Montréal blog. Where did that post sit in the eightyear journey presented on screen, I wondered. How actually was that Montréal sauna visit for Agassi?
Were the debauched encounters described in the post as fun as they sounded on the surface or was there something deeper taking place beneath the lines of text? Was, for example, this sauna visit skewed by Agassi’s spiral into drug addiction? Or motivated by anxieties brought on by a ceaseless, consuming churn within him that said he needed to constantly one-up his sexual self in order to sate the appetites of porn executives, sex tourists, and yes, us: the gay men who gain pleasure from his performances?
Heymann seems to have arrived at a similar understanding of the significance of certain Agassi sexual encounters he filmed.
“When Jonathan does not win the prize for the best porn film actor of the year for the second time, he escapes and in one of the dark nooks he has rough sex with a random guy, saying to the camera: ‘Jonathan Agassi fucks the best when he does not get awards’. It’s tragic.”
This documentary tells Agassi’s story with cinematic flair and sensitivity, but also an uncompromising commitment to ensuring that all who played a part in this story are challenged to reflect on their role in it. There are deeper realities to Agassi, a man who is more than a big-dicked porn star available for consumption.
“At the end of the movie I show the public a mirror,” says Heymann.