Oh, the troubled life of the writer. What profession has been romanticized as much as it? Girls’ Hannah Horvath let us in on the millennial angst of being a (comfortably) starving young artist living in Brooklyn, confused as to why no one else recognizes that you’re the voice of your generation. Sex and the City gave us Carrie Bradshaw’s saucy tell-all sexcapades of her and her three New York friends (do you sense a theme developing here?) immortalized in her column for The New York Star. And Jamal Wallace tugged at our parents’ collective heartstrings over his friendship with the reclusive-yet-inspirational writer William Forrester (Sean Connery, duh) in the admittedly white savior-esque movie about believing in yourself, Finding Forrester. Truthfully, the list of stories about brilliant writers trying to have said brilliance finally solidified with a book deal is long, and lucky for us, we can now add Mikko Mäkelä’s latest film, Sebastian, to that list, as well.
Sebastian’s promising writer in question is Max (Ruaridh Mollica), a young twenty-something gay man who writes freelance pieces for a fairly woke London magazine named Wall. At the start of the film, Max has recently had a short story (his specialty) published in Granta (IYKYK) and is set to interview Bret Easton Ellis (*chef’s kiss*) for a high-profile piece. He is also in talks with his agent about finally finally publishing a full-length novel about a sex worker named Sebastian and his many rendezvouses with London men. The catch is that Sebastian is not just a character in Max’s stories—he is also Max, himself, who has been moonlighting as said sex worker in real life, seemingly to do research for his book. He keeps his identity private by refusing to post pictures of his face on any of his apps, and none of his friends or coworkers seem to know about his second job.
The movie starts off as you’d expect: with sex. Sebastian (a.k.a Max) meets a man at his apartment for an afternoon hookup. The man is older, as are most of Max’s clients, and Max is seemingly fairly decent at his job. After, he returns home where he sits at his computer and writes down, almost word for word, the interaction between him and his client. This mining of real life for fictional gain seems to be how Max has created the entirety of his manuscript, but he is hesitant to label it as nonfiction. As the film carries on, Max becomes increasingly more wrapped up in sex work than his day job, until the whole thing threatens to consume his entire being. You get the feeling that you’re supposed to be asking yourself, “Where does Max end and Sebastian begin?”, but the problem with Mäkelä’s film is that Max’s motives are never clear enough to be able to suss out the film’s true message.
A handful of interesting themes begin to crop up throughout Sebastian. There is the obvious conundrum of what it means to separate fact from fiction, but there are also more complex things at work here, especially in regards to the LGBTQ+ community and their connection to the literary world. When Max becomes increasingly fond of one of his clients—an older gentleman with a lot of worldly, artistic knowledge and stories to share about his young adulthood as a gay man—he tries to shift his novel in a more sentimental direction, only to be rejected by his agent. Sex, it seems, is all anyone is interested in. But these promising threads start to unravel simply because there isn’t enough contextual background to firmly hold them in place long enough to form an opinion.
We know that Max has started working as a sex worker seemingly to research his book, but throughout the film, there is always the sense that this is only half true. Something else has pulled him into this profession, but we rarely get any kind of inkling as to what that might be. He tells everyone he became interested in the lives of sex workers after interviewing some of them for a piece he wrote at his work, but beyond this rudimentary explanation, we are never afforded a clear and honest look into Max’s true motives. Instead, we must slog through multiple, pretty boring sex scenes that neither titillate or stimulate the mind (to be fair, this might be the point). For what it’s worth, Mollica is impressive as Max/Sebastian, effortlessly switching between confident sex worker and insecure writer, making himself believable as the “wholesome boy next door” that’s “all filth underneath.” But his positive performance isn’t enough to make this semi ready to go.
Unfortunately, Sebastian can’t quite seem to get past its own basic set up to deliver something exceptional. The conditions are there, but performance anxiety causes the film to hold back, making this movie just another addition to an already overflowing genre.
Photo courtesy of Kino Lorber
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