"I call Toronto the city that farts. As opposed to Vancouver — that is the city of urine. In Vancouver, all the back alleys smell like urine. Toronto's like the city that farts, 'cause of all those grates in the subway."
On our Zoom call, Sook-Yin Lee throws her head back, miming the quintessentially Torontonian experience of getting hit in the face with a hot blast of foul-smelling air. "I always think that it's not the most beautiful city, but full of great people. But then I travel, and I realize that Kensington Market is, in fact, the best neighbourhood in the world. It's changed a lot, and it's somehow staved off gentrification entirely."
Lee's new film, Paying for It, is a love letter to the 1990s in the City of Farts. Based on her real-life relationship with cartoonist Chester Brown — who decided to hire sex workers after he and Lee broke up, and then documented his experiences in a 2011 graphic novel — Lee shot parts of the film in her own house in Kensington Market, where she and Brown actually lived together.
Paying for It also highlights nearby landmarks like Sneaky Dee's and Buddha's Vegan Restaurant, as Lee called in favours in order to finish the film on a tight budget and within 20 days of shooting. She composed the score herself alongside her frequent collaborator Dylan Gamble (of Toronto pysch band Hot Garbage), with a score coming out through Mint Records on January 31 — the same day Paying for It lands in Canadian cinemas.
Lee points out that one scene was even filmed in a real Toronto brothel, although she takes care not to reveal its location. "It's kind of like a documentary," Lee says of prioritizing unvarnished honesty. "With real locations, there's a veracity. There's an incredible quality of real life. Everyone's real life is full of extraordinary experiences, and it's really hard to confabulate that stuff."
Paying for It is nothing if not unflinchingly vulnerable. The film has been in the works for over a decade, as Lee approached Brown about adapting his graphic novel shortly after it was published. The script went through a long string of iterations: Lee would work on it, hit a roadblock, set it aside to work on other projects, and then pick it up again a couple of years later. Finally, she found the right narrative beats, expanding what Lee calls the "myopic" self-focus of Brown's graphic novel for one that leaves space to chronicle her own journey (as a fictionalized version of herself named Sonny) as well as humanizing the sex workers Brown hires.
Lee consulted with real-life sex workers in order to flesh out the film's characters — including local writer and actor Andrea Werhun, who previously worked as a sex worker and served as a consultant on last year's Anora, and has an acting role in Paying for It. Although the film isn't overtly didactic in the way it empowers sex workers and johns, preferring to show rather than tell, Lee is passionate about advocating for the right of the industry to exist.
"Paying For It is political, and with all my movies, the personal is political. I don't hit the audience over the head with politics," she asserts. "It's important to be able to look at consensual sex work through the lens of labour and realize that criminalizing consensual sex work is an unfair practice. This is labour, and the workers within this field have no rights, or very few rights, and if things go off the rails, they cannot ask for help."
She continues, "I am not a sex worker. I've done sex work-adjacent work — certainly in [2006 film] Shortbus, with non-simulated sex — but I am not a sex worker proper. I look forward to more movies where sex workers can tell their own stories. I think this is almost scratching the surface."