Sebastian Review-The journalist transformed into sex worker aims to transform the bustle into art | Movie

SortThe former work as a window on human nature is a long -standing theme in cinema, from the path of shame of Kenji Mizoguchi to Chantal Akerman Jeanne Dielman and onwards. It is intensified here by the fact that the protagonist Max (Ruaridh Mollica), who extracts his lateral escort work for the material, is also a writer. But this restless and response effort of the Finnish-British director Mikko Mäkelä, never completely moves away from the narcissistic prism of artistic creation, only fleetingly contact with human truths in flesh and blood.

During the day, Max is a freelance hotshot for Trendy Wall magazine in London; A sweet assignment has just been stuffed to interview Bret Easton Ellis. At night it’s “Sebastian”, a hot goods on an app called Dreamyguys. Generally, witnessing the older Lord, transforms his experiences into a naked prose that hopes to play in a more sold novel. But it is not clear what motivates him; Perhaps he is vanity and his professional progress is true story. Or, with his unreliability increasingly at risk his work, is there a deeper personal validation behind his secret life of the app?

Mäkelä seems only half interest in the realities and dangers of sexual work, compared to something like the most rocket 2018 French Hustler drama Sauvage. Such things would presumably be presumably in Max’s writing, whose peculiarities-passed only in some extracts with a generic-non sound are significantly recorded here. It is more the greatest struggle for transmuting life in art that concerns the director, with Ellis as a kind of comparison stone (there is a stroke of reference by Patrick Bateman of Max who controls his muscles).

But Mäkelä is too much in bed with the objectives of its protagonist to develop the type of perspective that could produce richer insights on the compromise of life/art. Max’s epiphany, through an in -depth relationship with the shy academic Nicholas (Jonathan Hyde), is criticized by his publisher as too Pat for his book. With the film partly captured in this self -referentiality, it does not develop much beyond a vague treated on the cost of pseudonym exploitation. At least the identification of the director with his main character translates into a strong performance by the crumb; Always present on the first floor of the head and shoulders and meticulously high with a series of wary smiles, nerve swallows and evasive looks.