**/****
starring Dan Beirne, Emily Lê, Andrea Werhun, Noah Lamanna
written by Sook-Yin Lee, Joanne Sarazen, based on the graphic novel by Chester Brown
directed by Sook-Yin Lee
by Bill Chambers Paying for It director Sook-Yin Lee is the ex-girlfriend of Toronto cartoonist Chester Brown. They broke up in the late ’90s when Lee fell in love with another man but continued living together. Overhearing the petty squabbles between Lee and his replacement, Chester gained a new appreciation for bachelorhood and swore off romantic relationships for good. To satisfy his sexual needs, he began to frequent prostitutes and, over the next few years, amassed enough material for a graphic novel. Part confessional memoir, part manifesto arguing for the decriminalization of prostitution, Paying for It was published in 2011 with an introduction by the king of porny cartoons himself, R. Crumb, who describes Brown as “a real connoisseur in the world of professional sex workers.” Now Lee has adapted the, er, fruits of Brown’s labour for the screen–which is quite the lede in itself (Woman Makes Movie of Ex’s Autobiography), but she also accounts for her whereabouts during Chester’s misadventures, fleshing out her ghostly appearances on the page into a full-blown character arc. Women have been consigned to the fringes of so many biopics that an artist’s former lover hacking into his autobiography feels nothing short of radically feminist. It’s also something of a tonic, as the book’s blunt assessments of the ladies Brown solicits can read as casual misogyny.
Yet Lee seems to lack the courage of her convictions, giving her alter ego an identity-obscuring nickname (“Sonny,” always in scare quotes), inventing, if Paying for It is any indication, a pet dog for pathos, and downplaying her not inconsiderable fame as a VJ on Canada’s answer to MTV, MuchMusic (here the lawyer-friendly “MAX Music”)–not to mention her exhibitionistic acts of sexual liberation, including kissing a woman on the air and conceptualizing and starring in the mainstream hardcore feature Shortbus with Hedwig and the Angry Inch creator John Cameron Mitchell. It’s not just that she doesn’t depict these things or find a fictional equivalent for them, however–it’s that, as “Sonny,” Emily Lê captures Lee’s essential sweetness but none of her bravado. Soft and turtlelike where Brown is spindly and cadaverous, Dan Beirne feels similarly miscast; it’s difficult to imagine him, or the actors playing stand-ins for Seth and the late Joe Matt (to whom the film is dedicated), as belonging to the fraternity of alternative comics artists, despite much of their dialogue coming verbatim from the book. Their energy’s off, so you miss the irony of true social deviants judging their friend harshly for becoming a john and abandoning romance. The metatextual fascination of the piece, which arguably extends to the casting of an actual former escort (Andrea Werhun) with her own memoir to sell as the Final Boss hooker, might ultimately overshadow the material. For all its frank sexuality, there is something disappointingly safe about Paying for It, almost as if Lee has wrapped the material in a prophylactic to preserve the sanctity of memory. Programme: Platform
