TIFF 2024
▞ Introduction
▞ 8. Band of Outsiders: On Neo Sora’s Happyend
▞ 7. The Soul of an Artist: On Hong Sang-soo’s By The Stream
▞ 6. The Two Maidens: On Trương Minh Quý’s Viet and Nam
▞ 5. The Master and Her Muse: On Jia Zhang-ke’s Caught by the Tides
▞ 4. Self-Studies: On Sook-Yin Lee’s Paying for It
▞ 3. The Inheritance: On All Shall Be Well and The Paradise of Thorns
▞ 2. A World of Pain: On Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Cloud
▞ 1. Mise en abyme: On Lou Ye’s An Unfinished Film
Sook-Yin Lee (director), Paying for It, 2024.
One of the traps of watching a film like Paying for It, an autobiographical film co-scored, co-written and directed by Sook-Yin Lee—and based on Chester Brown’s graphic memoir in which Lee features as his ex—is wondering what is real and what has been invented.
What did Brown, who himself makes a brief cameo in the film, leave out of his view?
What did Lee and her co-writer Joanne Sarazen sneak into theirs?
How far removed from “the truth” are we here?
There is a place for that sort of reading. But to become too preoccupied with a work’s authenticity distracts you from engaging with the film as it is: a film about figuring out what you want for yourself in life and having to pursue the answer the hard way: trial and error.
Sunny (Emily Lê) and Chester (Dan Beirne) break up but never grow apart.
Take Sunny, for instance, a video-jockey with undiagnosed ADHD, who, in the opening moments of the film, tells Chester that she is “falling in love with someone else” but does not necessarily want to stop seeing him or, initially at least, stop living with him. This catalyst leads her on a journey through a series of ill-fated relationships with men: one who is young and active but cheats on her; another who is passionate in bed but abusive; and the last a mirror, a narcissist who throws her words back at her, feeling that he, too, is “falling in love with someone else”.
Her narrative is a tale about figuring out how to organise her herself and grow out of a cycle of co-dependency: the mind of this film, while Chester, whose self-actualisation is the core of the film, is our body. At one point described as “a past white guy” who is “fragile like a bird”, Chester is an emotionally unavailable, somewhat notorious cartoonist who believes that romantic love is based on possession, and that what he goes after is “real love” when he turns to the consensual sex work to find a connection, which he will later turn into his art.
Rather than be about the sex itself, Lee is more concerned with the circumstances surrounding sex work, to, in her words, “allow sex-worker perspectives to shine through”, the before-and-after the act, which, being a thing that happens in the mind, is more pleasurable and meaningful to Chester than living a life not “paying for it”. Like Sunny, Chester, too, cycles through various women, each with their own lessons attached: one makes the first move on him; one wastes his time; one turns him off and makes him realise his preferences and then question them; but then along comes Denise, who makes his heart soften.
Captivatingly played by Andrea Werhun, a writer and former sex worker whose memoir Modern Whore is being adapted for the screen, Denise is Chester’s ideal woman: mature and vivacious, a beautiful body with an equally beautiful mind. With her he discovers the kind of attachment that will allow him to grow, and to realise that—as she tells him during their first pillow talk scene—for the right one he’d be willing “to do the work”.
Instead of being like Joanna Arnow’s The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed, premiere at the 76th Cannes Film Festival in 2023—which, with its strict minimalist aesthetics looking at BDSM relationships also divides its plot into chapters named after paramours—Lee is more in conversation with Gregg Araki and John Cameron Mitchell—an executive producer here. Filmmakers who turn the dial up on their imaginations so a moment of sensory overload can be abruptly brought back to reality, achieving its power in the juxtapositions, of straddling binaries while existing in the grey area.
Though the film depicts a polyamorous relationship, it is only through the lens of heterosexuality (a trans sex worker, The Other Angelina, appears in one scene, but it’s played as a gag); and though the film depicts the sex industry, it is only as a way for Chester to assuage his anxieties about his manhood, and also his desire to be perceived as a good caring client that the women would be glad to see since he doesn’t bring any sense of danger.
A remarkable aspect of this film—which had its world premiere in the Platform section of the Toronto International Film Festival—is that it never shames Sunny for not wanting to settle down and explore different options at the same time; or Chester’s relationship to sex workers, whereas his conventional friends, whose “hive-mind” round-table discussions are periodic and centred around his issues, seem to only want to uphold monogamy and patriarchal values, criticising them from within, but never being brave enough to do anything to subvert it.
In Understanding Comics, the cartoonist and theorist Scott McCloud, an influence of Brown’s, asserted a belief that comics operate on the principle of “simplification through amplification”, a method which Lee’s film largely adheres to, with cinematographer Gayle Le’s warm tones and focused framing, but, from time to time, there are dreamy sequences and flights of fancy that, by way of a range of cinematic techniques, of varying degrees of success, replicate complicated feelings: arousal that culminates in identification, estrangement in the workplace through a fuzzing slow-motion tracking shot, and the bliss of good sex.
The journey to getting to know oneself before letting another person in, to part ways as lovers and then, years later, coming back together as friends, is a delightful, albeit unique, one, that is only for them to tell. These are privileged people with rich inner lives who use the instruments of their chosen arts to make sense of their place in their world, which, in turn, might cause us, the audience, to make sense of our own. The results are endearing and entertaining when you’re in the right hands, of a person like Sook-Yin Lee, who never stopped loving.
Director’s stills
How to cite: Nagendrarajah, Nirris. “Self-Studies: On Sook-Yin Lee’s Paying for It.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 29 Oct. 2024, chajournal.blog/2024/10/29/paying.
Nirris Nagendrarajah (he/him) is a Toronto-based writer whose work has appeared in paloma, Polyester, Fête Chinoise, In the Mood Magazine, Tamil Culture, in addition to Substack. He is currently at work on a novel about waiting. [All contributions by Nirris Nagendrarajah.]
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