By Roger Costa
PAYING FOR IT
Delightfully odd and thought-provoking, Canadian director Sook-Yin Lee’s latest investigation on human desire and connection is a straightforward study on the uneasiness of love and sex. Structured as an existentialist sexual journey, it opens with the unexpected revelation of a cartoonist’s girlfriend to his face: she is seeing someone else, she’s in love with him and he will be moving in. Unable to process the “news” nor to abandon their relationship, he decides to distract himself engaging on sex-paid encounters with several call girls.
Quirky and authentic, the film is set in the early days of the new century, when cartoons and sex-paid ads made a large portion of many print publications (in New York, the Village Voice had a massive sex-paid, massage-disguised classified section). It treats the material with sharp and sarcastic humor while delivering a strangely captivating blend of nostalgia and adulthood inner conflicts.
Dan Beirne, who plays the protagonist Chester Brown, is excellent and hilarious. The film is adapted from Brown’s graphic novel, which seems to be autobiographical. Emily Lê is also fabulous as his former other half, an attractive and smart TV Host, struggling to find emotional stability. The cast is admirably in synch, and the sum of supporting parts make it for a great contribution of eccentricity and warmth.
It’s a vigorous portrait of the troubles of the heart and modern romance, its pleasures and complications, of how creativity and desire can affect one another and the kindness found in truthful friendships.
(A Film Movement Release. Opens Friday, January 30th at Quad Cinema. Director and special guests in attendance at selected screenings. Go to https://quadcinema.com/ for details).
A POET
Colombia’s Official entry for this year’s Academy Awards, Simón Mesa Soto’s Un Certain Regard Jury Prize-winner is a raw and sensitive study on both intellectual and transgenerational conflicts.
First time actor Ubeimar Rios gives a deeply grounded performance as Oscar, an alcoholic and failed poet looking for meaning while unemployed and living with his ailing mother. When he’s hired to teach poetry at a local school, he befriends a 15-year-old girl aspiring to become a writer and their bond stirs trouble and controversy among the girls’ family and the school’s direction.
Addressing socioeconomic issues, societal corruption and hypocrisy, and the horrifying replacement of intellectualism for populism, all while painting a melancholic, tragicomic canvas on an unlikely fatherly love situation, the result is an efficient and poignant dramatic achievement.
(A 1-2 Special Release. Opens Friday, January 30th at IFC Center).
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