by Cain Noble-Davies
Worth: $16.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Ruaridh Mollica Jonathan Hyde Hiftu Quasem Ingvar Sigurdsson Lara Rossi
Intro:
… trades in both writer porn and actual porn, but in a way that does justice to the emotional realities involved with each.
What happens when you have to diverge from the oldest tidbit of writing advice that exists, and have to write something you don’t know? Imagination can only stretch so far, and especially in the more fantastical genres, it only takes a split moment of misapplied allegory or misremembered historical reference point before the act of slaying a dragon comes across as unrealistic. Much like acting, there’s a method way of learning first-hand about such things to get more context and understanding of what’s really involved to make the words feel more real. But when does it stop being ‘just research’ and starts being something more?
Sebastian explores this through the character of Max (Ruaridh Mollica), an aspiring London writer who moonlights as a sex worker and uses that as inspiration for his writing. The film manages a good balance of destigmatising sex work as just another form of employment, and not shying away from the graphic viscera of the work itself, something that the mainstream often struggles with conveying, like how stripping on film tends to involve more dancing and less… well, stripping of clothes.
Couched within that is a larger discussion to do with literary authenticity, flirting with the conversation regarding who gets to tell whose stories and the overall murkiness concerning the ‘method’ method.
Max finds himself caught in the web of his own compartmentalisation, trying to reconcile the him that finds Cadbury’s cream filling and the him bleeding into his word processor about what that felt like. When you put in that kind of commitment, only to be told that your actual truth isn’t realistic enough, it can make your own life feel like it’s not worth anything. Writing asks a great deal of its acolytes.
As melancholic as this film gets, up to and including a fiery encounter with a client who discovers his main hustle, Max both as a character and as representative of the film around him refuses to be pigeonholed as just another tragic case. Along with providing the right measures of empathy and bristling relatability to strike a chord with the more logomaniacal viewers out there, his eventual meeting with and blossoming relationship with Jonathan Hyde’s Nicholas is simply beautiful. They encapsulate that idealistic view of love as freedom to show all sides of yourself to someone else, without worrying about how jagged the angles might look. Its modern setting only adds to that sense of liberation, as online existence tends to rely on similar notions of separating the physical you from the you on the page; the Max from the Sebastian.
Sebastian trades in both writer porn and actual porn, but in a way that does justice to the emotional realities involved with each. The acting combined with the frank presentation and open-wound perspective on intimacy of all flavours creates a story that acknowledges (and at times even succumbs) to the struggle of existing while writer-brained and Gay, but also the divine frenzy that comes with finding a couplet that brightens up the entire page.
