The Brooklyn Rail

What a coincidence that Gary Shteyngart’s Little Failure: A Memoir and Dana Ben-Ari’s Breastmilk published and premiered in the same year: 2014. What is even more of a coincidence is that Shteyngart became the subject of Dana Ben-Ari’s second film, The Guy Who Got Cut Wrong. Insofar as the essential issues concerning the commonwealth of physical being and self-mockery overlap, this film is fluidly and brilliantly depicted both on behalf of the subject and the filmmaker in a rare mutual human comfort, unpretentiousness, and deep empathy.

“You are a Jew in your head and your heart, not your penis.” One of the many vivid phrases in Shteyngart’s article “My Gentile Region” in the October 11, 2021 issue of the New Yorker. My favorite of these phrases was “the penis … like a walrus wearing a cape that shows up every once in a while to perform a quick round of gardening.” One can say that what the nose is to Nikolai Gogol the penis is to Shteyngart. In Ben-Ari’s moving picture, the guy who hated his penis is the same as the guy who got cut wrong. In addition to the strength and clarity of its narrative arc, the cinematography—moving between present tense filmed in beautiful black-and-white and past footage all in color—is equally compelling.

Whatever one may or may not suspect how both Gary Shteyngart and Ben-Ari share a mutual self-interest of and in human body (male and female) as a site of self-introspection, holistic manliness or feminism, satirical parody, intellectual klutz, among other Borscht Belt performative acts are gleamingly portrayed in the latter’s interpretation. “You’re part of me. You’re my dick.” Shteyngart concludes as the film ends. The Guy Who Got Cut Wrong is a must-see film that lies in the tradition of Guy de Maupassant’s short story and Franz Kafkaesque absurdity. I highly recommend it.