Sebastian

Max is a 25-year-old aspiring writer living in London. Alongside his journalist job, he works on his first novel, centered on gay male prostitution. Max finds his inspiration in an original way: he recounts his own experiences as an escort, under the alias of Sebastian. He is embodied on screen by Ruaridh Mollica, a charming and talented actor. Ruaridh perfectly conveys the inner complexity of his character. He is in almost every shot, including the numerous and graphic sex scenes that fortunately do not overpower the story. Writer-director Mikko Makela takes a non-judgmental approach to deal with topics such as the creative process, the world of escorts, self-discovery and self-acceptance. The images and colours are beautiful. The city, with its anonymity and loneliness, is a character in its own right. I found the movie interesting. It shows a raw side of current gay sexuality and correctly portrays a young artist in search of both success and identity.

Despite the film's confident naturalism, it seems less intimate as it goes on, with Max somehow growing more distant and generic as he becomes more comfortable in his own skin.

Synopsis: Max (Ruaridh Mollica) is a 25-year-old aspiring novelist, living in London and paying his dues working at a literary magazine. Frustrated by his own ambitions and the pressures to succeed, Max begins moonlighting as a sex worker with the pseudonym Sebastian, secretly meeting men via an escorting platform and using his experiences to fuel his stories. What begins as a few furtive meetings soon becomes a hidden nocturnal life, and the debut novel that he has been longing to write finally seems within reach. Finding himself more comfortable as Sebastian than expected, yet determined to keep his exploits a secret, Max increasingly struggles to remain in control of a delicately balanced double-life. As he confronts conflicting feelings of ecstasy, shame, and exhilarating liberation, Max has to reckon with whether Sebastian is merely a writer's tool to achieve first-hand authenticity -- or whether something more is at stake.

Max is a young aspiring writer in London, who does freelance work for a literary magazine, has had some short stories published, and is working on his 1st novel. He is inspired by some interviews with graduate students about being gay sex workers for money, but he is too conscious about possibly appropriating their voices, so he decides to go into the business himself, ignoring the irony of most 1st novels being autobiographical.

This he does under the name Sebastian, posting pictures online of his bare torso, but with his face obscured by his cellphone. He gets customers, and some call him back for more encounters. But his sex work starts interfering with his job at the magazine, while his publisher / editor is trying to shape the novel into a "marketable" story.

I do have a couple of minor quibbles about the script. While there are multiple sex scenes (with no cast members' members showing), they seem to be all straight-up penetration, No oral, no hand jobs, no spanking with a magazine or other kink. The other is the sequence where Sebastian is on an overnight assignment, has drunk too much, but still manages to sneak out of bed to immediately write down his activities, given that his research is for a work of "fiction", and inaccuracies / omissions / embellishments are fair game.

"Max" (Ruaridh Mollica) juggles a career as an aspiring journalist and novelist with charging £200 per hour selling his services as an escort to, mainly, older men. His boyish good looks and obvious inexperience at the latter makes him popular and he proves successful enough to use his varied experiences to form the basis of his book. His publisher likes the freshness and intimacy of the adventures of "Sebastian" but a rather self-induced setback at work forces a change to the dynamic of both his life and his work. Though there is the odd sex scene to enliven the drama, the rest of this is all a rather shallow investigation of the high-end comfort market and whilst Mollica is easy enough on the eye his performance over-relies on that and is quite lacklustre. The story itself has quite a few gaps that don't quite add up; timelines don't quite track and by the conclusion I actually thought that instead of offering us some sort of critical observation of an industry that transcends just about every aspect of society, we ended up with more of a rather exploitative - cruel, even, character about whom I really didn't care so much after a while. Jonathan Hyde brings a bit of (rather sad) nuance to the proceedings but Ingvar Sigurdsson's "Daniel" seemed just to Jekkyl and Hyde to be plausible at quite a crucial juncture in the young man's increasingly light-weight story. Rather than a movie, this might have made for a better three-part drama that could have focussed a little more cohesively on the aspects of his life, love and self-evaluation but as it is, it's all too bitty. Worth a watch, but not what it could have been.

In discussing an assignment for a Bret Easton Ellis report, a dispute surfaces as to whether one writer or the other asked for it first and if quality is subordinated to optics. The boss says, "I do think it best that queer writers cover queer authors" and that it is not a matter of optics but sensibility and sensitivity. This exchange illustrates an often-heard idea when it comes to art. Does it change if artists experienced, lived, what they write about? Does sensitivity and sensibility presuppose experience that translates, and is legible, as artistic quality?

Written and directed by Mikko Mäkelä, Sebastian is his sophomore feature that, like his previous one, A Moment in the Reeds from 2017, takes place in the LGBTQIA+ community. Mikko Mäkelä is interested in exploring questions of identity, personhood as a site for exploration with profound characters that defy any simplistic analysis. Max is a very interesting protagonist. Played by Ruaridh Mollica, Max is a young aspiring writer who already published short stories, some of which made him the recipient of accolades, and now wants to write his first novel. Ambitious and talented, he finds in sex work not only inspiration for his novel but also a vehicle for self-discovery. Sebastian is the name he chooses for his escort persona, something common in the profession as it helps to hide their real selves and therefore mitigate stigmatization. As someone new in this, Sebastian will encounter different clients who find in him something uncommon, i.e., someone honest and real who does not hide behind a description that does not belong to him. As one of the clients succinctly put it, "It's so nice that not everyone is deceptive." Words that do justice to their meaning because Sebastian is beautiful and they are captivated by him. The clients will provide Max the literary stimulus needed and also money, something that, for young authors, is not precisely abundant in the writing profession.

And while at its core a character study, something interesting about Mikko Mäkelä's feature is its social commentary about realities most do not have an insight into. Realities where money is always present, although many times occluding feelings that cannot find form to be translated directly. Love, even if it is of the carnal kind, and even if its purpose is short-lived once the fulfillment of desire is completed, never ceases to be but a façade of its true transactional nature that comes undone when the realization that the other is not a possession comes alive.

Its cinematography consists of aesthetic, stylish visuals that add to the sense of being in a world where appearance is of the utmost importance, its highest currency. Its sleek ambience bears a resemblance to The Girlfriend Experience, a resemblance, of course, not limited to its cinematography. Like Chelsea, Sebastian is not the answer to a traumatic past or the like, on the contrary, it might be said he is a heightened version when ambition meets possibilities.