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To motivate you, a moonlighting as a companion in this drama through Mikko Makela.
By Chris Azzopardi
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While sex drives “Sebastian,” the film gets stuck in the pregame mode. It follows Max (Ruaridh Mollica), a freelance writer, on his journey towards empowerment. Sex is the driving force of the book. Max thinks that at just 25 years old he is getting too old to write. And that’s why, thanks to literary inspiration, he himself has more sex. Older men keep her company. And what’s a coming-of-age story without?
Then he thought of a question: Will it be a novel or a memoir?This central dilemma, explored through writer-director Mikko Makela, comes down to authenticity, as Max struggles with his dating and sexuality as he navigates a double life as an escort (who goes by the name Sebastian) in London. Mollica captures Max’s caution well, as if he were carrying the weight of generations of sexual shame. Like a comic strip of a person, you can perceive it if you have been.
But Makela relies heavily on her audience perceiving the character’s past, adding a long history of stigmatization related to homosexual sexuality and prostitution. It’s admirable how “Sebastian” combats the cinematic history’s lack of real erotic representations of queer sex by raising its sex quotient, but the film follows its own tail, resulting in a predictable transformation that has the emotional resonance of an extracurricular special. It’s only when Max discovers the corporation of a retired professor, Nicholas (Jonathan Hyde, whose dignified role brings intensity to a film that lacks it), that the young editor emerges most clearly. But most of all, “Sebastian” is like seeing what Max sees in the gay dating app he uses: a faceless photo.
SebastianWithout rating. Duration: 1h50. In cinemas.
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