Sebastián Silva’s films are never boring and Rotting in the Sun is no exception. Alienating, sometimes. In this case it’s the male genitalia on display – big and small, in various hues and states of turgidity – that’s going to put off a lot of people. Difficult to swallow, handle, choose your own innuendo. Cheap shots to one side, the first thing to say about this film is that the weird thing about the cock is that it’s absolutely not necessary. No one needs to see men getting it on together for the film to work. There is a wilful perversity to it. Silva is daring his audience not to be alienated. Because in all other respects this is a straightforward farce of the old school in which doors open and close and the wrong people are always arriving in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Silva engineers the plot with a clockmaker’s precision and takes a key role as a gay Mexican artist obsessed with killing himself. Sebastián (his character name too) is hooked on ketamine and living in a dump undergoing extensive building alteration with a pet dog that likes to eat shit – human, animal, it doesn’t matter. He has a cleaner who makes things dirtier and a landlord who addresses him as “Homosexual”.
Maybe he’ll buy some pentobarbital and end it all, he muses, while reading EM Cioran’s The Troube with Being Born, a kind of self-help book for those of an aphoristically philosophical persuasion. An appropriate sample quote: “It is not worth the bother of killing yourself, since you always kill yourself too late.” Or this: “Man alone, in nature, is incapable of enduring monotony, man alone wants something to happen at all costs – something, anything….” The entire book is like this.
In the interim Sebastián heads to a nudist beach for a quick holiday, where he meets a social influencer called Jordan (Jordan Firstman) who is the vibrant, affirmative yang to Sebastián’s morose ying. Hey, says Jordan, I know your work and love it. Why don’t we do something together?
These bits really happened. Film-maker Silva really did meet Instagram influencer Firstman at a beach and Firstman really did persuade Silva that they should work together. But this is probably the only actual concrete connection to reality in this movie.
Because from here things rapidly enter the realm of the increasingly frenetic farce, with one person accidentally dead and a body suddenly to dispose of in a house that’s full of people – the cleaner, Jordan, the guys working on the building site, the landlord Mateo, a few guys Jordan invites over for a drugs and double-ended-dildo party and, eventually, the cops.
Central to it all, and the real star of the piece is Catalina Saavedra, who played the title role in Silva’s The Maid in 2009 and is also tidying up (in various ways) here as Sebastián’s useless cleaner Señora Vero. Saavedra is very very funny – one minute hurt dignity, another faux ignorance, yet another total incompetence, while around her mayhem is unleashed. It’s a Buster Keaton turn, really.
In Silva’s films, not so much The Maid but Magic Magic and Nasty Baby certainly, he likes to examine the gulf between the real and various iterations of the false – the imagined, the mythic, the wished-for, the virtual, the performative. And ram the “false” up against the “real” to see how the two of them get along. In Rotting in the Sun, for instance, there are male fantasies about sex on one hand and a dog with a taste for shit on the other. An Insta-influencer and a bona-fide film-maker. A man who plays with the idea of wanting to kill himself and someone who actually dies.
Silva approached Michael Cera, his star in 2013’s Magic Magic, to be in the movie. Which must have been an amusing conversation to listen in on. You can imagine Cera on the line while his agent makes the sideways cut-throat “end it” sign.
Silva’s shooting style is an Insta-happy one. Frenzied, psychotic, quixotic, paranoid, fluid, all handheld this way and that, attention deficit disorder to order. Which makes Saavedra’s performance even more of a contrast – Keaton’s nickname was Stoneface and her immobility versus Silva’s frenetic camera is one of the film’s best meta jokes.
It’s a strange film and in most respects Silva’s most mainstream to date. Pull on your big boy pants and dust off your broad-minded attitude and you should be OK. Even so there are things that will probably catch you off guard. For me it was…
Rotting in the Sun – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2023
