Mikko Mäkelä’s “Sebastian” is a barn-storming work, where daring flows effortlessly in its fraught probing into queerness, sex work, and the myriad cultural frameworks governing artistic identity. Its bold spirit of inquiry melds into a bracing character study, as Max (Ruaridh Mollica, scorching the screen in an unforgettable turn that should earn an instant spot in year-ender lists) moonlights furtively as a sex worker, Sebastian.
To gain authentic insights for a novel he’s writing about a sex worker, he sinks deeper into the seeming abyss of his covert other identity. However, Max doesn’t quite seem to know or be sure of what exactly it is that he is seeking in his encounters with largely much older men. It can’t just be money, as he reaffirms to one of his clients, the exceptionally gentle and kind Nicholas (Jonathan Hyde), who encourages him to go into the most emotionally earnest places with patience and reveals his own loneliness.
There’s an element of uncertainty in doing what Max is doing; nevertheless, he can’t help returning to take shelter in this secretly tucked-away avatar of his. Research for his novel may have been the starting gun of these pursuits, regarding which he has intensely ambivalent feelings. Yes, the minutiae of the experiences fuel his narrative voice, providing a direction.
But what about the after-effects and the implications emerging from his siphoning off real-life encounters for his art? Can he even shake off the ramifications so easily? Also, why does he feel swept by “shame about shame” in his double life as an escort? Why are these twinges getting increasingly overwhelming as he plunges from one encounter to the next?
Max’s approach to the interactions may have initially adopted a brusqueness. However, quickly, he finds it to bear heavily on him, especially if he is unnerved and discomfited when it comes to articulating the encounters without the guise of the third person. That is how he shields himself from letting the weight of his subterfuge get to him. But the stakes slowly rise, taking a toll on Max as he finds his dealings as Sebastian collapsing onto and trickling into his regular, public self.
It is this cardinal, chafing meeting point between Max’s reflexes to deny and stow away his feelings in those situations and owning them Mäkelä strikes at with ache and searching power. This configuration of identity, a gradually blooming sense of self, is tied in the film to contemporaneous debates on authorship. Who gets to write whose stories? Are only queer writers entitled to a prerogative of discussing queer authors? Are artists mandated to possess lived experience for whatever their art ranges over?
Max is disgruntled at being stuck writing short stories and reviews for the magazine where he freelances. He yearns to make the big leap into writing a novel. He is already twenty-five, and it doesn’t escape his attention that many celebrated authors were already out with their debut novels by that age.
In a star-making, boundary-defying performance, Ruaridh Mollica conjures a see-saw between absolute uninhibitedness and resolute guardedness. He has two personas to juggle. Max and Sebastian are halves of each other, threaded into a dynamic throbbing with constant tension. It’s a wrenching pull between the two he is caught up in. Albeit both have this untappable depth of reserve, Sebastian is more determined to flash a certain boyish appeal, whereas Max projects a grown-up conviction, almost brash in his stubbornness.
The latter is insistent on knowing his worth. His publisher, Dionne ( Leanne Best), interrogates him on the degree of realism that’s present in his novel, which he had originally pitched as an exploration of sex work in the digital age. When he interposes a genuine spark of connection in a chapter and continues with it, Dionne isn’t particularly pleased. She suggests the series of encounters is becoming repetitive and that the growing track of Sebastian’s warm intimacy with Nicholas may be getting a tad cheesy. Isn’t he deviating from the core of what he had pitched? Implicitly, she needles him into experimenting in Sebastian’s voice.
Max wants to press his claim further but can’t sincerely defend his work since it’d require him to truly confront himself. That he may be deceiving and using his clients isn’t something he can bring himself to fully admit, either to himself or anyone else. The slightest stab of guilt, precariously concealed, however, sneaks through Sebastian when a client tells him it’s rare not to be deceived from encounters forged on websites with people often downplaying their real age.
Mäkelä’s screenplay doesn’t allow us much leeway to explore the protagonist’s inward reasons and motivations. Instead, the film demonstrates this acute intelligence by enabling Mollica to have space enough for a performance that is full of teasing, exquisite enticing, and purposeful withholding. Often, you may not have a well-defined idea of what emotions are churning and twisting within Max.
It’s a tricky, thorny terrain Mäkelä navigates with the most assured, taut movements. The manner in which the film approaches and executes the many sex scenes, without a trace of fumbling or pussyfooting, itself merits a separate essay. The risqué is normalised in Mäkelä’s deft hands. It’s infinitely refreshing to watch a film handle a burgeoning awareness of one’s sexuality and what one wishes to do with it, divested of the usual moral predispositions. Ethics does come into play in crucial ways but only in ways that are for Mika/Sebastian to channel and discover the scope of his desire on his terms.
The sex scenes in this film are just glorious, unabashed, and exultant; Sebastian goes from pure ecstasy to confusion to hurt to reclamation. The beauty and brilliance of Mollica’s performance is in how he distinguishes two conflicting selves, the push-pull one exerts on the other while slowly blurring the lines to make way for a full-bodied repossession of Max’s thrusting desires sans the fear of being nabbed. With “Sebastian,” which ends on a note of powerful self-embrace, Mikko Mäkelä burnishes and cements his reputation as a formidable, sexy, and searing voice.
![Disobedience [2018]: A Complex Slow-Burning Drama about the Freedom of Choice](https://www.highonfilms.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/hero_Disobedience-2018-768x320.jpg)
![No Exit [2022] Hulu Review: Taut, Gratifying Thriller Falls Apart In The Third Act](https://www.highonfilms.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/No-Exit-2022-768x432.jpg)
![Always Shine [2016] : The demonic destruction of self-idealisation](https://www.highonfilms.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/15398938_10154102124838837_1527322389_o-768x432.jpg)