Life never stays still, even in our relationships…

It’s so rare to see a film like Paying For It that successfully has some real world conversations about the nature of relationships, sex, intimacy and how it’s evolving without hitting it’s audience over the head with a rubber mallet of unnecessary exposition.

Paying For It is a live-action adaptation of acclaimed alternative-cartoonist Chester Brown’s best-selling graphic novel. In the late 90s, Chester and Sonny are a long-term, committed, romantic couple. When Sonny wants to redefine their relationship, Chester, an introverted cartoonist, starts sleeping with sex workers and discovers a new kind of intimacy in the process.  As the idea of non-Monogany evolves, it deals with the complicated subject of the exchange for sex-work versus the complications of romantic love.

In what is undoubtedly her most accessible and most nuanced film to date, writer/director Sook-Yin Lee presents Paying For It as a frank and genuine look at the evolution of relationships and intimacy in the modern social landscapes which are evolving by the minute.

In this now her 5^th feature (which includes the two she basically DIY’d with partner Dylan Gamble during the pandemic), this multi-layered artist and former MuchMusic VJ has really found herself as a distinctly visual storyteller who isn’t afraid to leave the camera on her subjects for those one or two seconds longer in order to make us uncomfortable with their journeys but ultimately more invested in where these people end up.

Using a very broad colour palette, much of which you can find in the Toronto neighborhoods this was set, we get to see these characters go to places that could be considered a little dark but still manage to find some warmth to them all at the same time.  She’s crafted a world that’s emotionally honest and also safe, which when dealing with issues like this (particularly those centered around sex work) isn’t always the case, but too her credit Sook-Yin looks for the light in all this, not any kind of darkness which would have made for a weirder film.

Via some fantastic performances that she pulls out of her two leads; Dan Beirne and Emily Le we truly get to experience the awkwardness of these characters evolution on their journeys.  Both Beirne and Le give very understated yet physical performances which must have been uniquely challenging Lee because much of the source material from the graphic novel centers around her then relationship with writer Chester Brown.

While obviously nothing overtly scaring or dramatic happens over the course of the narrative it’s admittedly nice to see an artist essentially direct something that is quite essentially a slice of their own lives that is OK with the awkward moments that we all navigate in any relationship.

Ultimately, Paying For It is a shining example of quality independent cinema that isn’t afraid to look at people and characters that we all interact with in our day to day lives and that it’s actually OK to “talk about” the things that any of us want in any given relationship, because they won’t always stay the same.