Review by
Benjamin Poole
Directed by: Mikko Mäkelä
Starring: Ruaridh Mollica, Hiftu Quasem, Jonathan Hyde, Ingvar Sigurdsson, Leanne Best, Lara
Rossi
As is custom, earlier this month I bought my tickets for the Hay
Literary Festival. An annual scramble involving evaluation of the
weeklong events down to a single day which best suits myself and the
girls, the process is a real gamble. Big names may transpire to be big
bores, while the punt you took on booking to see an unfamiliar crime
author promoting their debut turns out to be the most funny and engaging
hour you've had all year. Thing is, it's unreasonable to expect a
writer, who does their best work silent and alone in their pyjamas in
front of a screen, to be a garrulous and charismatic stage presence, or,
indeed, in real life. Maybe the Romantics spoiled us, with their
irresistible life/art synergies and sumptuous Peter Ackroyd biogs
setting absonant bars, because the disappointing reality is that, unless
you're Joan Didion (which you're not, sadly, however much you wish you
were), there is nothing especially interesting about the life of a
writer.
Perhaps aware of this inconvenient truth, Max (Ruaridh Mollica), a young,
aspiring writer with a Bret Easton Ellis fixation (I feel seen, etc)
seeks to walk it as he writes it in Mikko Mäkelä's Sebastian. Creating a
novel detailing the exploits of a sex worker in the city, in pursuit of
researched experience he plies his own rough trade about London via a
hook up app.
Sebastian's tone regarding the conceit is at first set by
the film's poster, which features a tight close up of platonic twink
ideal Max staring off frame in poised contrition as a punter bums him.
This lachrymose tenor is followed up in the opening scenes when, after
servicing a customer (in contradiction to the marketing, Max turns out
to be a top), he throws up in the street outside before counting his
wodge of notes. This after the film has shown Max doing a Diggler:
staring at himself intensely in the bathroom mirror attempting to get an
erection via force of will. The suggestion is that what Max is doing is
grim but necessary work, and you're poised for a potentially harrowing
disclosure of the financially unstable and dog-eat-dog world Generation
Z has inherited.
This turns out not to be the case, however. Max house shares a clean and
spacious home, is staff for a glossy lifestyle magazine (a more staid
Sugar Ape) and has literally been published in Granta. He's got a doting
family back home and good looking, interesting friends. Max's rent-boy
research is conducted incognito (his online pseudonym is the film's
title, perhaps after the gay saint), and the film theatrically
prevaricates over his shame in doing this groundwork sex for his writing
project. It's as if Lee Child moonlighted as a wandering ex American
military policeman, Stephen King as a telekinetic prom girl. Surely the
key trait an author requires is imagination? My dear boy, why don't you
just try writing, etc?
Perhaps in pre-emptive response to this query,
the film implies that Max is endeavouring towards a Literary Brat Pack
lifestyle via his Bret Easton Ellis complex. Max frets that Bret wrote 'Less than Zero' when he was 21, and he watches YouTube vids of The
Canyons' screenwriter being interviewed with the same compulsive
preoccupation as Patrick Bateman watching pornography. In the office,
the various Hoxton heroes are working themselves into a froth about a
forthcoming interview with the esteemed scripter of Smiley Face Killers, which is to be couched as a "gay writer" feature (she won't
like that, nor being interviewed by someone younger than him.
Incidentally, intelligent, funny and beautiful, Eliza Clark is an
exception to Flaubertian be "boring in your life/original in your work"
dynamic, and also seemingly didn't need to prefigure her debut novel
with groundwork hedonism: when I rhapsodised about 'Boy Parts's compound
hangover cure, she told me that she doesn't even drink!). Look, I love 'The Shards' but surely this lot would be more cock-a-hoop over someone
like Rachel Kushner, or Sally Rooney, the last name particularly a
writer whose navel gazing novels would better suit this lot and their
self-obsessed world view; viz. Max's editor is pleased that his drafts "capture a sense of urban loneliness" (eeesh).
Sebastian continues and we see Max fail to balance his extracurricular
existence with his work commitments. The film appears to subscribe to
Gen X's weirdly puritanical and "negative" relationship with carnal
intimacy, as Max's commercial interactions are at once offered as
graphic spectacle but also a determined source of remorse. It is
strange, and, also, just as a writer's life isn't in and of itself
interesting, nor is the sight of other people having sex. Sebastian does
contort to vary the experiences: sad older men who we are positioned to
see as unattractive, a group of younger men who engage Max in chemsex,
and lovely, lonely Jonathan Hyde (a moving, layered performance which
essays a relationship between young and old gays, giving the film
poignant meaning and a more interesting direction) whom Max forges a
bond with. But, beyond prurient spectacle, is there anyone in the world
who would find this sort of thing - young and attractive man having sex
with other men - shocking or even interesting in a narrative sense?
In an
unpersuasive contrivance to juxtapose Max and Sebastian, we see the
protagonist espy Hyde's gentle figure at a literary event and
the former panics, sabotaging a vital networking opportunity, as if the
older professional is going to announce to the room that Max is a rent
boy he has paid money to have it off with. It's difficult to see what
the problem is, really, and so concurrently, in a bid to manifest drama,
we see Max fuck up at work, not filing copy in time and eventually being
dropped for the BEE interview. Yet even Max's unprofessionalism doesn't
really convince. It is completely possible to have a rigorous sex life,
go out and have a good time and also meet deadlines (ask the Waffler
editor: I haven't missed a single one). Max can't even be arsed to
review the latest Leila Slimani (what a woman), and her books are
basically all (compelling, devious) novellas! Lazy.
Maybe the entitlement is the point, and, like the early books of the
writer Max idolises, Sebastian is a part-satire of a world which the
creator is nonetheless smitten with. But whereas Bret's narratives slide
along the sheened surface of a coke mirror; always reflective, all hard
glass; Sebastian fosters emotional context. Max cries as he wanks to the
mirror. A hook up, mistaken that Max's affections are genuine, spits on
the lad when he is given a price: cue Max wandering wall eyed and sad in
the night. In a plot ruse perhaps enacted to take advantage of the
Belgian Tax Shelter, our boy ends up stranded in Brussels after a punter
discovers Max has been using their situation as grist to the writer's
mill... I'm sure that the reality of prostitution is unpleasant for
some, as it may be complication free for others, but in Sebastian the
haughty suggestion is that Max is morally transgressive for choosing to
sell his body. Um, ok? "Not everything has to be a great statement" our
hero pontificates at one point. Just as well.
Sebastian is in UK/ROI cinemas
from April 4th.
