Emily Lê and Dan Beirne in Paying for It.Gayle Ye/Supplied
- Paying for It
- Directed by Sook-Yin Lee
- Written by Sook Yin-Lee and Joanne Sarazen, based on the graphic novel by Chester Brown
- Starring Dan Beirne, Emily Lê and Andrea Werhun
- Classification N/A; 85 minutes
- Opens in select theatres Jan. 31
Critic’s Pick
There are several different films nestled inside of Sook-Yin Lee’s sweet, wry, provocative and wonderful new film Paying for It.
On one level, the movie is an irresistible time capsule, depicting an early-aughts era of Toronto when MuchMusic dominated the teenage discourse and Kensington Market was the be-all and end-all of cool (well, some things don’t change too much). Yet Lee’s film can also be appreciated as a sentimental character study, a political treatise on sex work, an anti-romantic comedy, and a revealing double act of self-portraiture. It doesn’t matter which prism you view Lee’s film through – they all intersect and add up together so seamlessly and confidently that you can choose your own adventure without sacrificing the whole.
In deciding to adapt Chester Brown’s acclaimed 2011 graphic novel – whose subtitle, “A comic-strip memoir about being a john,” spells things out nicely – Lee has ventured into the admirably messy work of examining her own life, given that she and Brown were once a real-life couple. While the director places a slight distance between herself and the world of her film – her character is called “Sonny” (played by Emily Lê) and works as a VJ not for MuchMusic but a channel called MaxMusic – the entire thing is shot so close to home (in fact, partially filmed inside the same Kensington Market home that the director once shared with Brown) that it cannot help but feel achingly intimate.
When the movie opens, the free-spirited music journalist Sonny and the highly introverted cartoonist Chester (Dan Beirne) are a nice-enough couple stuck in a rut. Chester is struggling to write a book about Louis Riel, and Sonny is looking to open up her sexual world. So, the pair decide – well, Sonny decides and Chester politely agrees – to expand the definition of their relationship. This leads Sonny to all manner of ill-suited men, and Chester into a perhaps more radical reality: rejecting romantic partnerships altogether, and seeing fulfilment in the beds of sex workers.
Lea Rose Sebastianis and Dan Beirne. Beirne is particularly engaging in a role that doesn’t automatically earn sympathy.Gayle Ye/Supplied
As the story dips between tracing Chester and Sonny’s evolving relationship and Chester’s encounters with various sex workers, the movie resembles a vignette-style comedy crossed with a reverse-engineered romcom. On paper, it shouldn’t work. Yet thanks to Lee’s smooth construction and her performers’ carefully calibrated performances – Beirne is particularly engaging in a role that doesn’t automatically earn sympathy – it all clicks together.
It helps significantly that Lee has made one giant change to Brown’s original work, which depicted all the women Chester encountered as strictly anonymous beings, their heads obscured in the comic-strip panels. At the time, Brown said that this was to protect the women’s identifying features, yet it unintentionally served to strip them of agency, personality and purpose. Here, the sex workers that Chester pays are presented as full-bodied characters, including Yulissa (Andrea Werhun, author of Modern Whore: A Memoir), who strikes up a dynamic with her client that suggests some new kind of long-term compatibility.
Given Lee’s filmography – including her coming-of-age sexual adventure Year of the Carnivore and gender-fluid ghost story Octavio is Dead! – Paying for It should not be confused as a groundbreaking departure for the director. But the film is her most synthesized work – a self-assured, deeply personal and thoroughly entertaining culmination of sorts for an artist who regularly faces questions of dependency and desire head-on. It is a labour of love that is worth every cent.