Sex With Strangers

Joe and Harry Gantz, the producer/directors behind HBO’s Taxicab Confessions, follow two couples and one turbulent menage a trois, all of whom are into the “swinger” lifestyle with varying degrees of enthusiasm. The film is ostensibly a documentary, but methinks the Gantzes doth protest too much. Many scenes—if not all of them—are patently staged, radiating the fishy odor of improvised psychodrama in which the performers are a bit too glib and articulate; if this is documentary filmmaking, then The Jerry Springer Show is 60 Minutes. Viewers who can swallow the fakery will be rewarded with a modicum of rather sad psychological complexity, but it’s undercut by redundancy and unconscionable length—105 minutes with these melancholy hedonists is frankly about 40 minutes too long.