An Author’s Secret Sex Work Makes for Dull Drama in Sebastian

Ah, the plight of the young gay white autofiction writer. What’s a 25-year-old Londoner with an agent, publisher and magazine job to do when feeling inadequate about his prose and his accomplishments? In Sebastian, he might supplement his straight-laced life with sex work—not just for the thrill, but for spicing up stories that may be what he fears most: mediocre. The drama finds a potential match with the conflict between the image-forward, public-facing needs of a modern creative and our desires for privacy, but it swipes left in favor of banal familiarity.

Often, Sebastian plays like a rejected article from The Cut, where a tired-eyed twink rejects all self-awareness in pursuit of literary glory. When up-and-coming author Max (Ruaridh Mollica) moonlights as “Sebastian” on the escort site DreamyGuys, his movie follows the standard sex work plot trajectory. At first Max is freaked out, then finds pleasure and fulfillment in the taboo. Then it’s scary again as he gets caught up in his own exciting secret life, falling down a slippery slope and giving into the various pressures he encounters at his night job. Along the way are all the scenes you’ve come to expect from these narratives: clarifying that a relationship is more than sex, actually; running into clients in “the real world;” reckoning with what you’ve become, either by staring in the mirror, sitting sadly in a tub, or crying while jerking off. It’s frustratingly simplistic. Tragedy shorthand.

Finnish-British writer/director Mikko Mäkelä, in his sophomore feature, at least directs the sex well. His intimate, graphic scenes are knowing and detailed, choreographed with that bare minimum insight that so much media lacks, where everything actually seems anatomically possible. On top of injecting a little biological reality, Mäkelä and cinematographer Iikka Salminen make the moody makeouts and transactional fucking the most interesting part of a cold and washed-out movie; Sebastian’s clients (expectedly) skew older, and their bodies are granted a visual equality with the more lithe prostitute. The camera’s close-up appreciations for bodies old and young, round and rail-like, sagged and tight, are more convincing than the similar points made in the script.

The story alternates between dull publishing-world fakeness (a lot of editor-type folks talking about the bravery and honesty of “digital hustlers”) and the true adventures of the writer-subject. Max finds gay community outside of the club or lit scene through his sex work. Daniel (Ingvar Sigurdsson) is a rich businessman with a family at home. Nicholas (Jonathan Hyde) is a chatty old academic with love to give. Both desire Sebastian, but their feelings towards Max differ. Sigurdsson, a standout from last year’s spectacular Godland, is a scene-stealer, full of wry life and warmth. Hyde offers a sadder version, equally winning. Both roles veer into stereotype, only defied by their performers’ abilities.

Max (and Mollica) isn’t so lucky. His turn is either overwhelmed by his more seasoned scene partners, or in service of emotional leaps and rote developments that demand superficial Big Acting which his director should’ve trusted him to tone down. Max is frustratingly tentative, self-loathing—a shallow character who naturally becomes more of an asshole with fame and success. Juxtaposed with a cast of straw men and plot devices (all far more stilted than Sebastian’s johns), his arc is as blunt and inelegant as an opening Grindr message asking for a hole pic.

It doesn’t help that nobody, not Mäkelä nor pretty much anyone else, has figured out how to make writing look exciting. You dread the moments when Max actually sits down to recount the escapades we’ve just seen him live, more than you dread a threatened Bret Easton Ellis appearance actually coming to pass. Mäkelä can capture something real about queer nightlife, shooting evocative moments at a drag king show, but that ability only makes you wish he’d abandon his main character—or at least let him mature a bit before subjecting us to him.

In the film Sebastian, Max’s friend gives notes on Max’s book Sebastian, which documents the events of the movie as lived by him…as Sebastian. More than a repetitive metatextual nightmare, her critique feels like a cop-out. There’s nothing clever about hanging a lampshade on your film’s own narrative shortcomings and structural foibles. You can have Max protest that he doesn’t want his story to be a gay sex work tragedy but when you follow the template beat by beat, making sure never to miss a bullet point (whether that’s an assault, a peer-pressured breaking of boundaries, a bad drug experience, or a surprising connection), you’re trying and failing to have it both ways. There’s something to Sebastian‘s brief observations about the accelerated destruction of the line between public and private life—especially when there are so many ways of being queer that, despite all the straight people’s assurances, are still forbidden to talk about if you want to get anywhere in life. But even Sebastian’s most deviant moments would rather fit in.

Director: Mikko Mäkelä
Writer: Mikko Mäkelä
Starring: Ruaridh Mollica, Hiftu Quasem, Ingvar Sigurdsson, Jonathan Hyde, Leanne Best, Lara Rossi
Release Date: August 2, 2024

Jacob Oller is Movies Editor at Paste Magazine. You can follow him on Twitter at @jacoboller.

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