Modern renaissance artist Sook-Yin Lee went from Vancouver teenage runaway to touring indie rocker to that beloved, off-the-rails MuchMusic VJ mooning the world beside Rick the Temp.
This only brings us to the dawn of the millennium — but it was a crucial time in Lee’s life, one where she’s spent a lot of sweat and blood revisiting lately.
Inspired by her onetime-BF, now forever friend Chester Brown and his landmark documentary graphic novel, Lee widened his first-person-singular story about engaging sex workers to include plenty of “female gaze” of her own, delivering a wonderful film full of heart, overcoming loss and ultimately something way beyond the mere binary of sex versus love.
The movie, like the original graphic novel, opens with Lee (“Sonny” in the film) saying, “Can we talk?” to Brown. Uh oh.
As the two dissolve as a traditional couple — here comes the tension! — the cartoonist keeps living in the VJ’s house in bustling, graffiti-tagged Kensington Market neighbourhood in Toronto as she starts seeing other people.
Lee summons one of Kurosawa’s great epics to explain how she approached adapting Brown’s comic, which took her years to land in its final form.
“Chester’s graphic novel and my movie are very, very different,” she explains.
“They’re different perspectives: my perspective from the events that occurred looking at Chester’s memoir, trying to support his understanding of his memory of himself.
“But also bringing a bunch of stuff that wasn’t in the graphic novel, trying to embrace what I thought were the most cogent parts of his political treatise for the decriminalization of consensual sex work.
“The adaptation was tricky — almost like a recipe — to really boil it down to its main ingredients.
“I couldn’t include everything,” she says, “and I didn’t want to tell the story as he did. Chester’s book is, like a pretty clear and concise political track.
“And I wanted to have a little bit more dialogue. I wanted to kind of debate some of his assertions.”
Most importantly, she wanted to turn up its universality.
“People can relate to the difficulty in finding love and connection, fraught relationships, desire for love and connection.
“But then, you know, the ‘what gets in the way.’”
This was done extremely well, with Lee and Brown’s “what they want” and “what they actually need” goals swirling around various personal and professional crises at the static-filled, ugly-font dawn of this 21st century.
“I made a lot of really misguided decisions in my romantic life,” Lee laughs, “and I tried to articulate that in the movie. And I love that kid, as stupid as she was at times, she really took care of me, my older self — and here I am able to tell that story!
“Chester is a profoundly huge person in my life,” Lee stresses. “He’s my family and he’s my best friend.
“I just feel so lucky to have known him and have him in my life, and he’s really just made my life so much better. So revisiting that, that relationship is really so nice for me.”
While Lee had most of the actors in mind while co-writing with Joanne Sarazen and getting into pre-production — these include non-actors, sex industry vets and Kids in the Hall’s Scott Thompson in a hilarious voice-over cameo as sex advice columnist Jules Eros — she went the traditional casting-agent route to find the two leads: on-screen Brown, and her “autofiction” persona, Sonny.
“Lesser actors made him seem like a jerk,” says Lee, “and he’s not a jerk — he’s an angel in my life. But there were only two actors that convinced me of Chester’s logic for paying for sex.”
The versatile Dan Beirne — who played Prime Minister Mackenzie King in Matthew Rankin’s astonishingly original The Twentieth Century — landed the job as the indie-famous cartoonist, literally bearing all … not counting the odd spent condom.
As for her proxy Sonny, Lee had seen Emily Lê in Anthony Shim’s period piece Riceboy Sleeps and asked for an audition.
“Emily comes from a similar kind of truly alternative arts background,” says Lee. “She’s first generation Asian Canadian, and could identify with some of the struggles that Sonny has, that sort of informed some of her decisions in life.”
When Lee saw the two together in that most modern way, online, everything clicked.
“Chester passes Sonny a book, and somehow they were able to seamlessly pass it from one to the other across two laptops in separate cities,” Lee says.
The book in the film, incidentally, is the actual copy of Oscar Wilde’s The Happy Prince onto which Brown had once painted a beautiful cover for Lee, a lovely, complicated symbolic touchstone of sticking together through the wars.
Another of the film’s meaningful symbolic flashes has Brown backed into a corner as he’s drawing Louis Riel’s immanent hanging, these subtle actual-art echoes bolstering the story’s realness and delighting comic fans as a bonus.
From her swirly music world, Lee’s use of videos from the day as Sonny endures her increasingly more corporate and dissatisfying “MaxMusic” job, well – chef’s kiss.
“I was on a shoestring budget, and it was a 20-day shoot,” explains Lee, “and I sort of created a model in which I knew that I could make the movie by really leaning on my community.
“You know, Thrush Hermit from the East Coast, Cub, Gob from the West Coast, Ghetto Concept, who were real groundbreaking people in hip hop in Toronto, and then VIP, who is the only Canadian boy band.
“So reaching out to those peers and telling them I was making this movie, and them saying, “Yes, you can have my video. In fact, I’ll bring it over after I drink my coffee.’ ”
But what’s extra impressive is that while Paying for It is indeed a period piece, its focus is more on the characters rather than, say, having a bunch of 1998 Ford Tauruses driving by nerds on chunky Nokias.
“I didn’t want to make a movie that was ossified in amber and some sort of nostalgic trip. I wanted to make a movie that’s relevant today.
“And the fact is,” Lee explains, “the spirit of why I make stuff is in everyone who contributed to the movie, and that is an intergenerational art force.
“And all of those spaces that I shot in exist now,” she says, including eternal Toronto burrito haven Sneaky Dee’s. “They’re precious, and they haven’t been gentrified — Buddhist Vegan, I just ate there. These are places that are amazing, they’re precious, and we must care for them.”
This spins us back to the Friday Metro opening. Even the film’s screening method reflects this punk ethos, touring like a band, selling T-shirts.
“I’m really so happy my producers have taken a wonderful approach that, to me, parallels the spirit of indie, independent musicians, who are very entrepreneurial.
“They reached out to make connections to film festivals and independent, repertory, local small businesses and non-profits like Metro who operate theatres.
“We continue to pack them in because people are hungry for this,” Lee says. “I love that.”
Sean Baker’s multi-Oscar-winning Anora — playing at 3 p.m. Saturday at Metro, P.S. — underlines the fact wider discussion of sex work is indeed knocking on the door.
“Five of the actors in my cast are characters and performers and artists, but they’re also filmmakers that deal with sex work in their movies.
“I think these successes are good because people will I hope yearn for more movies that reflect the dynamism of that experience, in its difficulties and in its mundanities and joys.”
Lee notes Belgium decriminalized sex work two years ago. “And then two months ago, consensual sex workers won all the rights of all workers. So there’s childcare, dental, leaves of absence, and that’s progress.
“But at the same time, there’s a lot of regress, as you know, with a lot of fundamental human rights being taken from us.
“So I think it’s like, it really is a call for people to be aware of all these things.”
But ultimately, says Lee, “I wanted to make a movie that was like a warm embrace in hard times.”
PREVIEW
Paying for It
Where: Metro Cinema (8712 109 St.)
When: 6:45 p.m. Friday with Sook-Yin Lee Q+A, 9:30 p.m. Sunday/Tuesday