By Robert St. Martin
Los Angeles, CA (The Hollywood Times) 7/11/23 – The first Friday of this year’s Outfest at the Directors Guild of America will feature Sebastián Silva’s newest endeavor – Rotting in the Sun (USA/Mexico, 2023), a satiric comedy where no topic is off-limits. With a lot of unsimulated sex and frontal nudity, the latest provocation from Chilean auteur Sebastián Silva finds the director playing a loose version of himself as an artistically blocked filmmaker in Mexico City addicted to the pain killer ketamine and snorting poppers. This might seem a stretch even for Sebastián Silva, whose previous comedies like The Maid and Nasty Baby garnered much critical attention. The Chilean director’s work is not for everyone, but Rotting in the Sun makes fun of so many gay stereotypes that the graphic gay sex turns into mordant farce. It is literally deadly with Silva playing a despondent version of himself, barely surviving in a shabby apartment in Mexico City and contemplating suicide.
With a chance encounter with an oversexed American influencer named Jordan (played by Jordan Firstman) and party boy, things begin to change for Sebastián, who nearly drowns at a gay nude beach in Mexico. He gets rescued by none other than social media star Jordan who has just seen Silva’s film Crystal Fairy (2013), about two friends in search of a hallucinogenic concoction in the Chilean desert. Much like Silva in his own life, the fictional Sebastian of the film has writer’s block but decided to return to painting, at which his is quite good. (In fact, Sebastian Silva currently has some of his painting in a posh gallery in Mexico City and they are selling). In Rotting in the Sun, Sebastian starts writing again, and he hooks up with Jordan after the beach rescue and they hit it off sexually, as we see in graphic detail in the film.
Firstman proposes a new HBO project that could shake the director out of his existential crisis. Things take a wildly unexpected turn for Sebastián (played by Silva), skewering his own life. His housecleaner, Signora Vero (Catalina Saavedra), begins to behave with suspicious secrecy. but just as things start shaping up, Silva goes missing, forcing Firstman to gather the clues to his disappearance between Instagram live feeds, art openings, and an occasional gay orgy. No one but Sebastián’s evasive housekeeper Vero (Catalina Saavedra, Silva’s The Maid) seems to have any clue as to his whereabouts. There is no doubt that the film is not for everyone. The film contains unsimulated sex scenes, about which Silva states: “The sex is so graphic that it’s a double-edged sword. People, especially Americans, are so scared of genitals. I’m scared a little bit that a lot of people will center on the cocks and talking about cocks when it’s just a trait of one of the characters.”
Rotting in the Sun screened in Sundance’s Premieres section. Robert Pattison has come aboard as a producer due to his interest in the movie. Silva is quite aware of the aspects of his satirical approach to the story: “Because I did use my persona to poke fun at myself and what I represent, in a way – a privileged white Latino director who’s constantly dissatisfied. It is ridiculous that privileged people like me live in this sort of existential torment. It’s not like we’re facing real problems, unless you get cancer or some health issue. It’s like, “Oh, I didn’t get financed for a movie about whatever….”
Silva concedes that he was first approached by Jordan Firstman about the project. Silva had never heard of the real-life Instagram influencer. “I feel that Jordan represented the most superfluous kind of living: an influencer who’s poking fun at things, wearing Balenciaga, and just being very celebrity hungry. I asked him: Are you willing to play yourself, and for me to write a character and a portrayal of you that truly humiliates you and shows your lifestyle? Would you have explicit sex on camera, as often as you do? He was very willing, and he was laughing at me insulting him. I thought, I’m going to get along with this weirdo.” Sebastian Silva wants his audience to know that the graphic gay sex in the movie is not erotic at all. This is “not a movie about dicks, and it’s not a ‘gay movie.’ It’s a thriller, a crime mystery, a dark comedy, making critical commentary on the state of culture and selfishness right now.” It seems that Jordan Firstman in real life lives his life the way he is portrayed in the film.
On the other hand, the character of the cleaning lady Signora Vera as very vengeful follows in the pattern of The Maid, which comically critiques how privileged people patronize less privileged people. “It’s a comically rude movie,” she said. “No one is spared.” Her character’s language barrier with Firstman leads to a recurring gag involving his phone’s translation app. “With Jordan, we had no greater challenge than to play the relationship of two strangers unable to communicate,” she said. “Google Translate doesn’t work to communicate. We laughed a lot.”
Rotting in the Sun carries all the familiar themes of writer-director Sebastián Silva’s work: Class tensions, sexual intrigue, disarming comedy with unsettling punchlines. Built into the film is Sebastian Silva’s own lingering obsession: “Contemplating suicide is a very bourgeois activity for bored people,” he said. “You have so few real problems that you just live in this constant existential turmoil.” In the film, we see Sebastian reading Emil Cioran’s The Trouble with Being Born, a book: “Only optimists commit suicide, optimists who no longer succeed at being optimists. The others, having no reason to live, why would they have any to die?” Apparently, Silva himself is doing much better now, as a fairly successful painter and having directed a few episodes of his friend Julio Torres’ HBO show “Los Espookys” and spending time in the writers’ room for HBO miniseries “The Staircase” directed by another friend, Antonio Campos.
As for Jordan Firstman, who is 31, he made himself into a social media star during the COVID pandemic. He says: “I grew up in the suburbs on NY with a pretty nice Jewish family. Of course, there was some darkness hiding underneath but I didn’t realize that till my 20’s, so it was a good childhood. I started in the arts pretty young and did theatre and was obsessed with it. Then came comedy, then film. My biggest influences I’d say as a teen were Stephen Sondheim, Sarah Silverman, and Woody Allen. Weirdly, I have seen Vicky Christine Barcelona over 200 times and it got me through my parents’ divorce.” Curiously enough, Firstman just played the role of Mr. Wilson in The Wonderful Mrs. Maisel TV series; he has made several short films, including Men Don’t Whisper (2017).
One might not agree with the words of the nihilist philosopher Emil Ciordan that “A book is a suicide postponed,” but in the Sebastian Silva’s Rotting in the Sun, we are left to ponder whether a film is a “suicide postponed.” Rotting in the Sun will screen at Outfest Los Angeles on Friday, July 14, 9:30 PM, in the Theatre 1 of the Directors Guild of America. It will also be available online through Outfest Streaming, beginning July 17. For tickets, go to: www.outfest.org.