“One of the best Canadian films of the year!” - Exclaim! Magazine
Selected as one of CANADA’S TOP TEN movies by TIFF and Canadian Film Festival Programmers
In the late 90s, Chester and Sonny are a long-term, committed, romantic couple. When Sonny wants to redefine their relationship, Chester, a shy and introverted cartoonist, starts sleeping with sex workers and discovers a new kind of intimacy in the process.
In a double-act of portraiture, filmmaker Sook-Yin Lee, Chester Brown’s real-life ex, adapts his graphic novel memoir into a uniquely compassionate movie, especially in its handling of sex and intimacy. PAYING FOR IT is about love, sex, and non-monogamy for adults re-considering hetero-normative lifestyles.
For Paying For It: Original Soundtrack, Sook-Yin Lee and Dylan Gamble, keyboardist in the psych band Hot Garbage, stretch their classical and instrumental jazz chops with 28 original film music works and compositions like Chester’s Fugue, Chinese Restaurant Music, Pink Brothel, and Comic Con.
The characters, “Chester” and “Sonny,” are represented by corresponding motifs: Chester's classical preference parallels his solemn stoicism, while Sonny's music is as mercurial as her reactive nature, made up of pop songs at MaxMusic, the music video station where she works as a VJ.
A solitary artist, Chester draws while listening to classical music. His routine is disrupted when Sonny suggests opening up their relationship. Ethereal feminine voices sonically portray Chester’s inner fantasy life as he begins to explore his desires that lead him to pay for sex.
Beyond her life with Chester, Sonny embraces alternative culture with grunge-inspired music like Shitty 90s Song and the propulsive rave techno of Ecstasy.
While mystical siren singers evoke a seemingly unattainable and idealized woman, Chester and Sonny navigate separate paths of self-discovery, and a vibrant, contemporary morality emerges that has as much to say about us now as it does about the 90s. By the end of the movie, balance is restored in the final composition, Closing Credits, where male and female voices blend in harmony.