Paying for It – TIFF Canada’s Top Ten 2024
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February 5 to February 9, 2025
FILM FESTIVAL
Canada's Top Ten 2024
TIFF Canada's Top Ten
A cartoonist begins hiring escorts after the status of his live-in relationship changes in Paying For It. Chester Brown (Dan Beirne) is an independent comics artist, who is taken aback when his girlfriend Sonny Lee (Emily Lê) tells him she is falling for another man. Initially, Dan and Sonny attempt an open relationship, though it doesn’t work out and Chester finds himself moving into the basement of their house.
Deciding to experiment himself, Chester begins hiring escorts for sexual services, without the baggage that comes with relationships. Chester ends up feeling liberated by this decision, even his friends Cain (Chris Sandiford) and Cecil (Ely Henry) are concerned by his paying for sex. Chester’s dynamic changes again when he enters into an arrangement with outcaller Yulissa (Andrea Werhun).
Paying for It Synopsis
Paying for It is a romantic sex comedy co-written and directed by Sook-Yin Lee (Octavio is Dead) based on the 2011 autobiographical graphic novel of the same name by Chester Brown. The film stars Dan Beirne (The Twentieth Century) as Chester, while Emily Lê (Riceboy Sleeps) plays Sonny Lee, the semi-fictionalized stand-in for the role Sook Yin-Lee herself played in this story. The plot of the film involves the sexual liberation Chester feels by hiring escorts, while Sonny goes through a rotating door of various boyfriends, including Miles (Ehren Kassam), Carl (Stephen Kalyn), and Reed (Ishan Davé).
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Paying for It is arguably Sook-Yin Lee’s most personal film as a filmmaker since it is just as much her own story as it is Chester Brown’s, right down to shooting the film in the same house she still lives in Toronto’s Kensington Market. That said, Lee does provide some distance between herself and her on-screen avatar by renaming her Sonny, despiting the fact that the character is depicted as a VJ for “Max Music,” mirroring the fact that Sook-Yin Lee is best known for her time with MuchMusic. Providing this distance allows Sook-Yin Lee to pull no punches with the depiction of Sonny, who sets the plot in motion by turning her relationship with Chester Brown into what’s essentially a cuckold arrangement, albeit with no ill will towards Chester.
Paying for It follows in the footsteps of fellow Canadian films Young People F***ing and My Awkward Sexual Adventure by being a very sex-positive film that tries to destigmatize sex work. There is a notable scene in the film, where Chester visits the apartment of one of his regulars, only to find that it was raided by police, under the assumption these independent escorts were exploited women working for a pimp. Paying for It goes further by casting former sex worker and activist Andrea Werhun, author of the memoir Modern Whore, as Yulissa (aka Denise), who has a pivotal scene in the film where she describes getting paid for sex as being empowering work for her.
While the plot of Paying for It takes place between the years 1999 and 2002, the film can be viewed as a commentary on how the typical heteronormative relationship is no longer the norm. The film also gives a not-so-subtle swipe towards the 2014 law that made paying for sex illegal, in response to the decriminalization of sex work the same year. Ultimately, the end goal of Paying for It is to help demonstrate that sex work is just work.
Trailer for Paying for It – TIFF Canada’s Top Ten 2024
