Sebastian review – journalist turned sex-worker aims to turn side-hustle into art

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Ruaridh Mollica is very good as Max, a freelance writer with a secret app life in prostitution, but Mikko Mäkelä’s film is not clear enough about his motivations Sex work as a window into human nature is a longstanding theme in cinema, from Kenji Mizoguchi’s Street of Shame to Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, and onwards. It is intensified here by the fact that the protagonist Max (Ruaridh Mollica), who mines his side-hustle escort work for material, is also a writer. But this uneasy, self-regarding sophomore effort by Finnish-British director Mikko Mäkelä, never fully distancing itself from the narcissistic prism of artistic creation, only fleetingly makes contact with flesh-and-blood human truths. By day, Max is a freelance hotshot for London’s trendy Wall magazine; he has just bagged himself a sweet assignment to interview Bret Easton Ellis. By night he is “Sebastian”, a hot commodity on an app called DreamyGuys. Typically servicing the older gentleman, he turns his experiences...
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Last Tango in Paris at 50: Bertolucci’s controversial drama remains troubling

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The Italian director’s knotty drama remains a provocation, a film filled with lyrical beauty but also repulsive cruelty

Revisiting films on the occasion of major anniversaries can be a disorienting reminder of time’s too-swift passage: that film is now 20/30/40 years old? How can that be? Why does it still feel so much younger than I do? In other cases, however, the film wears its advanced age in a way that makes complete sense, and so it is with Last Tango in Paris, released in cinemas in 1973. Now a half-century old, Bernardo Bertolucci’s lightning rod for scandal and debate has dated in many of the ways you might expect, but that’s not quite what I mean: at 50, the film’s age has now caught up with the overriding air of middle-aged despair and disarray that it always carried. In a sense, it was a film made to be forgotten, and then remembered with bittersweet, conflicted feelings, its significant beauty curdled over time.

Bring up Last Tango in Paris in cinephile circles today – especially those reckoning with the gender politics of the artform post-MeToo – and you won’t hear that many fond endorsements. When it’s brought up at all, the conversation swiftly narrows to its most notorious scene: the one where Marlon Brando’s Paul, a recently widowed American abroad, holed up in a desolately furnished Parisian apartment, forces himself on Maria Schneider’s Jeanne, a 20-year-old ingenue whose name he refuses to learn. Grabbing a dab of fridge-cold butter for lubrication, he anally rapes her.

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