Writer's Tricks
Sundance Institute
MOVIE REVIEW
Sebastian (2024)
The young writer at the heart of “Sebastian,” Max Williamson (an astounding Ruaridh Mollica), doesn’t seem to know how lucky he is. As many queer authors in London can tell you (ahem), it’s not usual to find a literary agent based on short stories written in university, nor for your first book to get such rave prerelease reviews that you’re personally profiled in the newspapers, complete with a professional photoshoot. If you have a job freelancing for a serious monthly magazine there’s no way you’d dismiss even the most boring advertorial as beneath your talent, when that writing work affords a London rent. And even if you were the most gilded literary talent in your city, your peers in your creative writing workshop will never, ever applaud your work. They’d nitpick out of jealousy. But having said all that, the device of the ongoing deconstruction of Max’s writing is clever meta-critique of the plot of “Sebastian,” in which this young man with such obvious talent decides to risk it all by delving into sex work. Gay sex work, no less. It’s a tremendous high wire act; and it’s a testament to the bravery and skill of everyone involved that the movie succeeds completely.
None of this would be possible without the unbelievable performance of Mr. Mollica, who here announces himself as a star of the first order, with the good looks and the emotional subtlety to make all of Max’s competing, not always attractive impulses compelling to watch. For Max’s nom-de-sex-work is Sebastian, used on an app where he refuses to post face pics but is still able to find as many punters as he pleases thanks to the rest of him. The sex is graphic, though (with one brief exception) not pornographic, and through his contact with the punters – almost exclusively wealthy older men who also provide the drugs for free – Max is learning a great deal about himself. He is also turning those encounters into his first novel, “Sebastian,” which he constantly claims to his agent, Dionne (Leanne Best), and his best friend, Amna (Hiftu Quasem), is based on interviews with students who turned to sex work to pay for their education. This is a relatively new phenomenon in Britain, which used to pay young people to attend university, but where the education system is now morphing into an American-style tuition-based catastrophe. It’s easy to understand how the literary world, always eager for hot new sensations, would dive all over this.
Everyone comments on how his novel feels like it’s coming from personal experience, which Max allows his female supporters – Amna is also a writer, only not as successful – to credit to his enormous talent. More importantly, it’s obvious that when Max is writing down his experiences that this is the only time he is happy. But that pleasurable pull of finding new experiences to fictionalize begins to threaten Max’s career at the magazine, where he’s hoping to be chosen to write a major profile of Bret Easton Ellis (whose participation here is another kind of meta-commentary; and he is thanked profusely in the credits). Max’s editor, Claudia (Lara Rossi), makes some very sharp points about the current need to emphasize sensitivity for the readers along with the own-voice sensibility of the writers, without tolerating any of the unprofessionalism that her stable of young writers might think this support of their identities enables. Cinematographer Ilkka Salminen gives London a gloss that it rarely has in real life, except when you’re young and arrogant enough to think the city is your oyster. Then Max-as-Sebastian meets a new client, Nicholas (an excellent Jonathan Hyde), a widower with a gorgeous house and old-fashioned highbrow tastes whose sexuality, and long-term relationship, has been hidden all his life. The visual style becomes more appropriately muted when they are together. And that clever choice demonstrates the core question of the film: Nicholas achieved a financially successful life in London at the cost of being open about himself, while Max has the sexual openness with none of the monetary success, at least not yet. Is it possible, nowadays, for someone to have their cake and eat it?
Writer-director Mikko Mäkelä clearly understands two things inside out. Firstly, how difficult it is to succeed in London and how hard anyone must work to achieve anything here – though by choosing a handsome white man as the hero “Sebastian” is clearly playing on the easiest setting. But more importantly, it understands how thoroughly society has changed in the last 40 years, where young people can now be open about their sexuality without anyone caring in the least. Pushing this to include sex work when Max could just have been focused on a gay young man’s search for love is the new sensation that brought this to the Sundance Film Festival, but that bold choice will clearly limit the movie’s wider audience. That said, the sympathy for the punters, most of whom are terrified of their sexual urges and who either overcompensate with drugs or struggle to justify their desires even for someone as pretty as Sebastian, is cleverly contrasted with the scenes of Max and Amna having a broke but delightful time out and about in London. Where the movie slips is the sequence in Brussels, where Sebastian has agreed to accompany a client named Daniel (Ingvar Sigurdsson, who perfectly embodies a particular type of personal selfishness), and where Max is confronted for the first time with the stigma that sex work still holds. It’s difficult to imagine that this is the first time Max has to face this literally, instead of through his friends and supporters’ commentary on his writing. But that is nitpicking.
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