Dr. Ruth Westheimer
Photo: FilmweltOf course, she also reports on what it was like when she herself had sex for the first time. Dr. Ruth Westheimer is now 92 years old and is probably the most famous sex therapist in the world. In the United States, she was a radio and television star for many years. The documentary "Ask Dr. Ruth" presents the heroine right from the start in historical TV appearances with David Letterman, Barack Obama and various Hollywood stars - and the robust comedy of her appearances does not hide the seriousness of her concern to explain sexuality in an easily understandable way . "It's my job to create something that lasts," says Ruth Westheimer once into the camera.
In the moments when she talks about her first night of love, which she experienced as an 18-year-old in an Israeli kibbutz, the cinema viewers see animated images as she storms to the haystack hand in hand with her young lover, a soldier in which she will lose her innocence. Then the film shows the real Ruth Westheimer walking around the same kibbutz in 2018 and raving about the experience of that time.
The documentary filmmaker Ryan White often makes his work about the life of the always refreshing Ruth Westheimer look like a graphic novel that recreates important scenes from the life of the heroine in a bit of a kitschy way. Really lively, funny and often touching, however, is White's film, because the now 92-year-old Westheimer speaks almost continuously. She tells of very dark times in a wonderfully excited voice. About her childhood in a Jewish family in Frankfurt am Main while the Nazis seized power in Germany. About her father's deportation to the concentration camp in 1938 and about her being sent to Switzerland on a so-called Kindertransport. About her work as a sniper in the Haganah Jewish Liberation Force in the Israeli War of Independence of 1947.
After studying in Paris and moving to the USA in the 1950s, Westheimer's TV success story only began there in the 1980s. In a society that is notoriously uptight and at the same time sex-crazy, Westheimer did a terrific, cheerful educational work not just by explaining the human genitals and their use in a very clear way. She also advised some of her clients seeking advice, as can be seen in the film, to please separate from their partner immediately and find a new guy.
According to therapeutic and scientific standards, Westheimer did not always behave seriously, which one of her colleagues criticized. It is basically the only critical objection in a portrait that has features of worship. Filmmaker Ryan White, who previously made a documentary about tennis player Serena Williams, among other things, is obviously taken with Westheimer's charm. He accompanies the 145 centimeter tall heroine to the Swiss town of Wengen, where she spent her teenage years, tormented by worrying about her parents, who were deported by the National Socialists and finally murdered in the Auschwitz concentration camp.
White visits Westheimer in her pleasantly untidy office in Washington Heights, New York, in north Manhattan. And he watches her at the birthday party on the occasion of her ninetieth in a company of smart and devoted people. He lets her tell of various husbands as well as a few small and big disappointments and swarms cunningly and funny with children and granddaughters.
The courage, cleverness and wit with which Dr. Westheimer spoke and speaks of sex, may not seem so revolutionary to some of today's viewers. It is therefore a good thing that the feminist Gloria Steinem has a say in this film with the remark that she had "never heard a woman honestly talk about sex in public" before Ruth Westheimer made the world happy.
One of the mottos that this entertainer, who is absolutely committed to enlightenment, hurled into the world is the assertion that, among men, skiers are particularly good lovers. Westheimer's explanation: "You don't sit in front of the television all day, you risk something - and you know how to wiggle your buttocks."
Icon: The mirror