'Sebastian' review: a gay writer takes risks to boost his career

The impulse to write about what one knows can be both empowering and restrictive. In director Mikko Mäkelä’s moving and insightful film “Sebastian,” a young writer grappling with this familiar conundrum begins to create a life designed solely to be plundered in pursuit of his fictional aspirations. In the process, he is forced to confront the porous lines he has drawn between fact and fiction — between who he is and who he has become in writing.

Born in Edinburgh and making a living in London as a freelance writer, Max (a magnetic Ruaridh Mollica) is itching for more. He’s fed up with submitting short stories he’s not too proud of, fed up with writing reviews of other people’s work. Like many ambitious twentysomethings before him, he feels he’s not doing enough, let alone fast enough. Bret Easton Ellis, whom he’s researching before an interview, published his first novel when he was 21. As a strategy to infuse his writing with a sense of heated urgency, Max has taken up escorting older men. After each encounter he arranges as the shy, sly “Sebastian,” he dutifully sits down at his desk to add another chapter to his novel-in-progress: a story about an unabashedly self-assured sex worker named Sebastian.

The nested-doll structure of Mäkelä’s film speaks to the writer-director’s fascination with the pleasures and perils of autofiction. Max tells himself that he only engages in sex work to shape the ideas he has for his novel. Yet he often feels uncomfortable during such moments of sexual intimacy. Filmed in tangled, tight close-ups and medium shots where hungry flesh and lustful moans overwhelm character and viewer alike, such sex scenes prove, in turn, quite moving.

Max’s performance on paper, as well as in the sheets, is endlessly seductive: “You’ve got that boy-next-door air about you,” a fellow escort coyly tells him, a flirtation that doubles as a scathing read that elicits a mischievous smile from her. “But underneath it’s all dirt.” And so, as he delves into increasingly thorny scenarios (group chemsex with strangers; repeated encounters with a man who recognises him at a literary event; a trip abroad paid for by a regular client), Max begins to lose track of what he’s getting out of these encounters. He’s becoming more daring, but also rather pigeonholed by this secret life he’s come to nurture.

In the end, those late-night encounters with men who treat him with a welcome and quite unexpected tenderness bring to light latent feelings that Max doesn’t know what to do with. Whatever self-discovery occurs, Max pours it into his own work. Before long, he’s receiving praise from his editor. He’s praised for his unvarnished (and marketable) look at gay sex work, devoid of shame and trauma.

In Mollica’s hands, Max is an uptight young man who searches the eyes of others for a glimpse of who he is. He appears on screen (often alone) for much of the film. His constant furtive glances make us wonder who this agile young man really is, to others and especially to himself. Is he a disobedient guy who passes up bar dates to score dates with clients who will serve as writing material? A driven writer who spends entire nights at the keyboard pretending to know the people he sleeps with better than they know themselves? An insecure young man who seeks approval from cheaters and peers alike?

“I forge my existence in the world using words,” Max tells an interviewer when discussing his writing. “They are the footprints I leave behind.” It’s the kind of sentence he immediately regrets uttering, thinking it too serious. But stifling seriousness is all young writers like Max have. When his novel, like his encounters with one particular client (played with delicate beauty by Jonathan Hyde), becomes slightly more romantic, his editor insists he return to the ruthless tone he had honed so perfectly earlier.

Striking a delicate balance between lurid voyeurism and down-to-earth naturalism, Mäkelä’s film is a disarming, perhaps slightly overly highbrow wonder, with its nods not only to Ellis but also to auteurs like Jean Genet and Cyril Collard. But with its penetrating, sensual gaze, “Sebastian” makes its portrait of an artist as a young sex worker brim with aching authenticity about how fleeting, seemingly transactional intimacies remain rich sites of exploration for queer writers.