September 25, 2024

VIFF 2024 | Sleeping Around – Sook-Yin Lee Refunds 'Paying for It'

"Romantic love is bullsh*t and I'm not wasting anymore time chasing it!"
Dan Beirne Lea Rose Sebastianis Chester Smith Sook-Yin Lee | Paying for It | VIFF 2024
Vancouver International Film Festival
VIFF 2024—Vancouver-born former MuchMusic VJ and CBC Radio host Sook-Yin Lee comically adapts the autobiographical 2011 graphic memoir, Paying for It, written and illustrated by her former partner, Canadian cartoonist Chester Brown. Based on the end of their actual relationship in the 1990s, the charming sex work comedy explores Brown's subsequent decision to give up on romantic love and start exclusively paying for sex as the title suggests.

Starring Dan Beirne as an agreeable version of Brown joined by Emily Lê as the slightly fictionalized Lee stand-in, Sonny, a "MaxMusic" TV host, and Modern Whore author Andrea Werhun, a former sex worker herself playing one here, the earnest film casually eschews normative sexual conventions to explore healthy transactional companionship involving intimacy and intercourse.

Lee treats the material, partially based on her own life experiences, with reverence and respect, especially towards the sex workers involved. She fleshes them out as characters even those with limited screen time. There's a discomfort to how easily Beirne's Brown detaches himself from the intimate emotions of physical relations after his breakup before going on a sexual awakening of his own not dissimilar to Lee's similarly-themed debut film, Year of the Carnivore.

Paying for It certainly has some strong late-'90s Toronto alternative art scene and quirky indie movie vibes grounded by Berine and Lê's strong performances as friends and ex-lovers who respect each other's personal spaces and romantic boundaries. It's both refreshingly sweet and explicitly provocative about its depiction of sensual desires outside of traditionally accepted normative relationships.

Paying for It screens at the 2024 Vancouver International Film Festival as part of the Showcase series at the Rio Theatre on September 30th and Fifth Avenue Cinemas on October 1st.


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