Mikey Madison, the star of this year’s big winner at the Oscars, Anora, used the occasion to proclaim solidarity with sex workers. “I just want to say that I see you. You deserve respect and human decency. I will always be a friend and an ally, and I implore others to do the same.” Not all viewers, though, were persuaded that the film’s take on the subject – in which the protagonist veers into problems after impulsively marrying a Russian oligarch’s feckless son – bore much relation to the grubbier realities of sex work. Its director, Sean Baker, is romantic about marginalised lives.
Sebastian, the second feature by 36-year-old London-based Finnish director Mikko Mäkelä, while no less positive about the subject, feels a lot closer to contemporary realities. Mäkelä moved to London to study English and French literature, and as he explored the queer scene, realised many of his peers – students and grads starting out in creative industries – were involved in sex work, facilitated by apps, marketing themselves online without shame. “For many, sex work seemed to be becoming just another increasingly normalised option in London’s gig economy,” he has said.
Max (Ruaridh Mollica) is a 25-year-old aspiring writer with a story already published in Granta and an established position as a freelancer on a surprisingly plush literary magazine (the film is a bit doe-eyed about this world). To research his novel-in-progress about sex workers, Max touts himself (£200 for one hour, £300 for two) on an app called Dreamy Guys, under the pseudonym of Sebastian. Most of the men he meets are much older and uglier, but Max, far from being repulsed, sweetly sees this as an opportunity for transgenerational exchange – a rare chance to learn more about queer lives in more repressive times. No sooner has he turned a trick than he is back at his laptop, recording it all in a form of instantaneous autofiction, reading out chunks to writers’ groups and submitting samples to his prospective publisher.
Max is on screen in every scene, not only in all these encounters but also often on his own, in front of the mirror or travelling around London, sometimes lost in the crowd but more often, in a sustained close-up. It’s a high-risk strategy to take, casting a relative newcomer for such a critical part, but Mollica, Scottish-Italian, 24 at the time of filming, repays it handsomely. He’s absorbing to watch, often tentative and uncertain, always assessing himself, quite withdrawn at times and vulnerable, his few small smiles incredibly winning. Mollica has spoken about how making the film was part of his own journey into queerness and that aspect really shows, in a way that may be hard to duplicate. A boy he meets on the job says: “You’ve got that wholesome boy-next-door thing going on – but it’s all filth underneath!”
The many sex scenes here are remarkably well-filmed and performed – graphic but not pornographic – staying with the men throughout the encounter, revealing their emotions as well as acts. Mäkelä’s approach to such scenes is very different from that of Hollywood, let alone most British cinema (Andrew Haigh excepted), much more akin to the European “body cinema” of Olivier Assayas and François Ozon (the latter’s sex worker film Jeune et Jolie is a clear model here). You soon realise that this sex is about not just pleasure and transaction but also identity and communication. Mäkelä said that “so much of queer intimacy can exist within and around (casual) sexual encounters but I don’t think that should devalue them – there seems to operate a moral scale on the length of an intimate relationship for how it should be valued.” The film challenges that.
All does not go well. Max is bounced into a chemsex orgy, he’s rebuffed by a bullying businessman (Ingvar Sigurdsson) who catches sight of what Max has just written about him. But on the other hand, a very tender relationship develops with a cultivated, elderly academic (superbly played by Jonathan Hyde, 76), in mourning for his life’s companion.
The optimistic arc of the film is a little too pat and tidy. Max moves on from needing the shelter of an alter ego, Sebastian, to owning every aspect of his life as himself, changing the novel he is writing from “he” to “I”. There’s too much fond cultural allusion (Max is planning to interview Bret Easton Ellis; he delivers a spontaneous mini-lecture on Cyril Collard’s Les Nuits Fauves).
Yet this is a film about sex work and what it means to take possession of your own story that makes others (the peculiarly Anglican piety of Good Luck to You, Leo Grande, no less than the gloss of Anora) seem artificial.
“Sebastian” is in cinemas now
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