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Drama 110 min
Rotten Tomatoes76%Metacritic64IMDb
How far would you go for the story?
Max is a 25-year-old freelance writer and aspiring novelist who seems well on his way to success in London’s cultural spheres. Yet by night, he finds a different kind of exhilaration as a sex worker with the pseudonym Sebastian, meeting men via an escorting platform. Max uses his experiences as Sebastian to fuel his stories and the worthy debut novel that he has been longing to write, finally seems within reach.
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Raw, prestige, intimate and spare.
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“Max” (Ruaridh Mollica) juggles a career as an aspiring journalist and novelist with charging £200 per hour selling his services as an escort to, mainly, older men. His boyish good looks and obvious inexperience at the latter makes him popular and he proves successful enough to use his varied experiences to form the basis of his book. His publisher likes the freshness and intimacy of the adventures of “Sebastian” but a rather self-induced setback at work forces a change to the dynamic of both his life and his work. Though there is the odd sex scene to enliven the drama, the rest of this is all a rather shallow investigation of the high-end comfort market and whilst Mollica is easy enough on the eye his performance over-relies on that and is quite lacklustre. The story itself has quite a few gaps that don’t quite add up; timelines don’t quite track and by the conclusion I actually thought that instead of offering us some sort of critical observation of an industry that transcends just about every aspect of society, we ended up with more of a rather exploitative - cruel, even, character about whom I really didn’t care so much after a while. Jonathan Hyde brings a bit of (rather sad)
Read the whole review on TMDBAuthors striving for authenticity in their work often engage in extensive background research, sometimes of a firsthand nature, to get things right. However, when it comes to writer-director Mikko Mäkelä’s second (and inexplicably much-applauded) feature, I have some serious reservations about its applicability here. This tale of a talented young London-based author of award-winning short stories and magazine pieces is embarking on his first novel, an inside exposé of the lives of gay male sex workers. To find out what these experiences are like, the ambitious emerging wordsmith, Max Williamson (Ruaridh Mollica), decides to investigate the subject by becoming an escort, arranging hook-ups through an internet website under the pseudonym “Sebastian.” But, the more involved he becomes in his research, the more he becomes consumed by it, unsure how to keep control over it. Strangely, though, there are also times when he’s apparently ambivalent about it, going to great lengths to keep both his hustling work – and even his sexuality – a secret. Is he trying to keep from being discovered by his clients and writing peers, or is he a closet case who, quite ironically, hasn’t fully come to a
Read the whole review on TMDBChecking availability…
Closest on the same fourteen dimensions, from everything scored on Taste Buds. Other media included when they land close.
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