Paying for It: Sook Yin-Lee’s humane Toronto tale reflects on love and sex work
Set in Toronto’s late 1990s artist milieu, Sook Yin-Lee’s film adapts the graphic novel by her ex-partner Chester Brown, creating a candid his-and-hers narrative of their open relationship and its break down.
- Reviewed from the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival
For Torontonians of a certain vintage – let’s say late Gen-X-ish, and with at least one box worth of hand-crafted mixtapes in storage – Sook Yin-Lee’s new feature Paying For It may feel like a time machine. So let’s all meet up in the year 2000 (or thereabouts) when Canada’s largest city and its downtown core doubled as a hothouse incubator for all kinds of emerging, neo-bohemian creatives doing-it-themselves and also a launching pad for the forces of corporate pop-cultural gentrification.
Chester (Daniel Beirne) is an author and illustrator whose strategically minimalist, self-published strips fuse deadpan observational comedy and political commentary (his magnum opus is a stylised retelling of the life and times of the 19th Century Canadian Indigenous politician and agitator Louis Riel). His girlfriend, Sonny (Emily Lê) is a charismatic talking head at a music-video channel where low-fi punk rock promo clips are being edged out by slick boy band productions – a sign of the times that gives Sonny something to scowl fetchingly about in between throwing to viewer request. Her carefully studied hipster-chick screen persona has made her a local microcelebrity with aspirations to real stardom – and given her a case of impostor syndrome in the process.
Chester and Sonny share a cluttered, slightly dilapidated bungalow in the funky, artist-infested Kensington Market in Toronto as well as a circle of cool-nerd contemporaries; they co-own an adorable little dog named Morrie, whose wizened, floppy-eared presence is like an emblem for a relationship that’s aged out of the puppy love phase. Chester and Sonny like and respect and care for one another, and they want to live together; the problem is that their sex life – always fairly vanilla – has evaporated over time. They’re sleeping together, but they’re not sleeping together; as the film opens, Sonny realises it’s been so long since they’ve done it that her birth control prescription has expired. “Can it do that?” asks Chester. It can.
Sonny’s solution is blunt: an open relationship, with all the freedom – and emotional indulgence – that the term implies. Chester says OK, but his nice-guys-finish-last deference belies a deeper sense of hurt. When Sonny invites her new partners to get comfy in their old bedroom, he retreats to the house’s soggy basement to sketch the nights away, projecting the sulky despair of a little kid who’s been sent to his room. Freshly soured on the prospect of romantic love – and practical about the possibility of using the situation to pad his body count – he begins the methodical process of scouring alt-weekly magazines and Java-script era websites for private escorts. He also makes sure to read up on the correct etiquette for transactional sexual encounters; when he makes his first house call, he makes sure to leave a generous tip.
There’s some crucial autobiographical context to unpack here: Chester is based on the real-life cartoonist Chester Brown, whose acclaimed 2011 graphic novel about his often-less-than-steamy escapades was subtitled “a comic-strip memoir about being a john.” Sonny, meanwhile, is a thinly veiled stand-in for the director herself – a former punk rock front woman, MuchMusic VJ and long-standing axiom of Torontonian cool. Working with screenwriter Joanne Sarazen, Lee has carefully adapted her ex-lover’s roman-à-clef while reshaping it into a dual character study – a his-and-hers narrative that tries to see the situation from both sides without taking one or the other. The film is attuned to the way that couples can hurt each other more brutally by accident than on purpose – a theme previously explored in Sarah Polley’s Take This Waltz (2011), which was set in and around the same community.
Like Polley, Lee’s good intentions are palpable, and her actors are excellent, especially Beirne, with his genially opaque face that can seem smarmy one moment and stricken the next. Dramatically speaking, however, the results are uneven; the movie’s episodic structure makes conceptual sense but also results in a slightly shapeless viewing experience.
As for the copious in-jokes, they’ll predictably resonate more deeply with anyone who lived through this particular broken-social-scene, although some of the best lines are universal: “I even watched movies from the Criterion Collection,” whinges Sonny about her attempts to please a new cinephile paramour. It should be said that, in between gags, Lee and co-writer Joanne Sarazen do an admirable job of depicting – and destigmatising – the ins-and-outs of urban sex work – all without resorting to didacticism. Paying For It may be a modest movie, but it’s not prudish or squeamish in the least; it’s got a humane spirit.