Paying for It

Paying for It (2025)

In the late 1990s, when Sonny seeks to redefine his long-term relationship with Chester, the painfully introverted cartoonist begins sleeping with sex workers and discovers an unexpected new form of intimacy.

Date of release
2025-01-31
TMDB
6.7 / 10 (15)
Runtime
1h 25m
Genres
Drama, Comedy
Director
Sook-Yin Lee

Casting

Interesting facts

  • Based on: Paying for It

Paying for It is a 2024 Canadian drama film, directed by Sook-Yin Lee. It is an adaptation of Chester Brown's graphic memoir Paying for It, about his decision to start frequenting sex workers after the breakup of his real-life relationship with Lee. The film stars Dan Beirne as Brown and Emily Lê as Sonny, with Andrea Werhun, Kaitlyn Chalmers-Rizzato, Stephen Kalyn, Chris Sandiford, Kris Siddiqi, Scott Thompson, Sera-Lys McArthur and Rodrigo Fernandez-Stoll in supporting roles.

Production

Production on the film was first announced in 2022. In contrast to the original graphic novel, which used artistic techniques to obscure the faces of the sex workers due to Brown's concern for the women's privacy rights but faced some criticism for seemingly dehumanizing them, Lee's film adaptation, through a "female gaze", more strongly centres the women's own perspectives.

Although Lee herself is a character in the original graphic novel, for the film adaptation she chose to rename her character Sonny to give herself some creative distance from the material.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

Recommended