In response to a request to introduce himself, Max — the hero of Mikko Mäkelä’s Sebastian — is reasonably vague. He says he’s 24 and from Edinburgh. His crises, if we can call them that, are just as generic—at least for people in their twenties. To put it in two questions: What to become? Who to fuck? Maybe not in that order. What is a bit unique about him is his attempt to commingle the answers.
By night, he’s a sex worker, servicing mostly closeted older men who have enlisted on Dreamyguys, a queer, Only-Fans-ish platform with a rather drab UI. By day, he’s a freelance writer, penning reviews for literary publications in London. It is an unusual combination but only on the surface. Anyone who knows anything about the state of the media business since the rise of Google and social media understands why supplementing a writer’s income with other work—even sex work—is not a bad idea.
Writer-director Mikko Mäkelä seems quite familiar with the state of play. He casts a very assured eye across the land of literature. He gets an editor to ask Max a knowing question at an editorial meeting: “Do you think literature pays for itself?” The inquiry comes with a punch to our hero’s artistic instincts: someone else is going to handle the Bret Easton Ellis interview he was looking forward to, while Max is dispatched to cover the launch of yet another app coming out on the market. We get it. In life and in art, tech trumps text.
In his ideal future, Max is a “serious” writer of books, not someone spending his, er, spunk on reviews, short stories and, presumably, tech reports. To that end, he’s writing a novel about a young man named Sebastian who’s a sex worker. He’s feeding his art with his life, a pretty common tack for writers, except that Max seems to be actively engineering the process.
We see him replay events from his nightlife as he sets down these moments in vivid prose, which he then sends off to an editor. When he’s given notes about varying his character’s uniformly elderly clientele, he accepts a proposal to join an orgy involving younger men in real life. Everything (and everybody) is copy. But therein lies the danger, as Max comes to see.
Perhaps because of the nature of the subject, Mäkelä films the queer sex sessions in quite graphic terms. There are no male members onscreen but there is a lot of homosexual thrusting, derrieres, and butt cracks. But after the initial shock of gay coupling mere minutes into the film, the other sessions seem gratuitous. This is hardly unusual for first-time directors looking for buzz but, post-festival, those scenes could potentially limit the audience for Sebastian—although it’s hard to say by how much, given the general population’s indifference to non-brand names in literature.
For a certain type of young person, though, Sebastian is a blast. It is a well-made film that ought to get a lot of attention in and out of festivals in both the U.S., the UK and, especially, in Europe. The film’s preoccupation with the literary market and the media’s gig economy suggests that journalists should fall over themselves with pieces riffing on what Sebastian says about the modern economy for literature and the decline of the media business. So, it’s fair to say that if those think pieces show up in torrents, Sebastian will find an easier path to the very few young people still in love with serious literary stuff. (The nerdiest of that group may wonder how possible it is for one person to win both the Goncourt and the Booker Prize, as a character does here.)
There are no heavy visual or narrative flourishes in Sebastian but Mäkelä does get an utterly believable performance from his lead actor, Ruaridh Mollica. He also seems to be a very good writer of prose from the snippets we see onscreen. And yet, if the director’s own screenplay is to be believed, he needs to perish any idea of writing a novel. After all, he created a character who tells us convincingly, “There’s not much money writing fiction, or in writing full stop.” He can always channel his literary aspirations into a second feature film.
Director, screenwriter: Mikko Mäkelä
Cast: Ruaridh Mollica, Hiftu Quasem, Ingvar Sigurdsson, Jonathan Hyde, Leanne Best, Lara Rossi
Producer: James Watson
Executive Producers: Mike Goodridge, Lizzie Francke, Jennifer Armitage, Mariyah Dosani, Philippa Nicholl
Co-Producers: Aleksi Bardy, Dries Phlypo, Erik Glijnis, Leontine Petit, Rosie Crerar, Ciara Barry, Severi Koivusalo
Cinematography: Iikka Salminen
Production design: Guy Thompson
Editing: Arttu Salmi
Venue: Sundance (World Cinema Dramatic Competition)
In English, French
110 minutes