An Orgy of Dicks, Ketamine, and Class Warfare
The solipsism of artists and influencers offers infinite variations on self-lacerating lampoon, and Sebastian Silva’s new film Rotting in the Sun comes up with a dandy. Here Silva, the Chilean filmmaker best known in the States for the Michael Cera psychedelic quest movie Crystal Fairy & the Magic Cactus, creates a suicidal, ketamine-crazed Mexico City filmmaker, named for and played by Silva, and a comically, brutally self-absorbed internet personality, named for and played by the comedian (and internet personality) Jordan Firstman. Jordan wants Sebastian to collaborate on a happier variation on Curb Your Enthusiasm, called You Are Me. Sebastian just wants to die, and before long he gets his wish, but not as he planned. Meanwhile, Catalina Saavedra steals the topsy-turvy show as a maid afraid of losing her job (similar to the role she played in Silva’s 2009 film The Maid).
Pause. Deep breath.
Rotting in the Sun is shot in close quarters with handheld cameras and lots of close-ups, of faces and male anatomy in various stages of arousal (the film, showing in select theaters and streaming on MUBI starting Sept. 15, is very unrated). It feels both jagged and loose, an off-the-cuff spleen-venting frolic that Buñuel might appreciate for its barbed-wire skewering of the privileged class. Sebastian begins the film despondent, reading Emil Cioran’s The Trouble With Being Born (whose title more or less speaks for itself) and publicly excoriating his dog for eating human feces. He takes a friend’s advice and heads to a nude beach where all manner of gay bacchanalia is going down, and where he continues to read Cioran and hoover ketamine. This is where he encounters Firstman, gamely playing a noxious version of himself and hot to trot with his barely-formed project. Sebastian doesn’t like the guy, but he likes the money. Then he goes home to his Mexico City artist’s studio, where he becomes the unfortunate victim of an accident involving a couch, a ledge, and the aforementioned maid, Vero.
Among the film’s gambits: the narcissists, Sebastian and Jordan, turn out to be mostly a decoy for the hired help. Silva wisely put a gifted actress at the center of the chaos; Saavedra is a bundle of anxieties and barely concealed recriminations as Vero, a neurotic who nonetheless has both feet on the ground. As Jordan, who ventures to Mexico City, and others ask the question of the hour – where the hell did Sebastian go? – Vero schemes to cover her tracks, dispose of a body, and, yes, keep her job. She doesn’t have the option of being an “influencer,” or a navel-gazing artiste. She is the film’s dominant counterpoint, mostly to Jordan, who has to use a translation app to even understand what the woman is saying (a device that plays absurdist comic dividends at the end of the film). Much of the time there’s an orgy or a K-fest (or both) going on in the next room. A secondary character borrows a baby to use as a prop for a performance art piece. Ah, the life of leisure.
Rotting in the Sun, a Sundance breakout, unfolds in a screen-happy world, where virtual distractions create a buffer from real-world concerns (like, for instance, suicide and poverty). Sebastian chooses to scroll through benign diversions – amateur stunt mishaps, autotune singing dogs. At one point he takes a virtual meeting with a pair of obtuse HBO executives, which goes kaput when he loses his Wi-Fi connection. Jordan yammers away on the IG, recording every belch of a thought. He’s content to believe he matters to everyone. But for Sebastian, there’s a cost to such alienation from the actual world, and it’s manifested in existential dread (or The Trouble With Being Born).
Silva’s work may sing familiar refrains – cringe comedy, doppelgänger frenzy – but he remains an original. He’s a prankster with a lot weighing on his mind and his soul, a sad clown happy to hold up a cracked mirror to himself and his milieu. This is thoughtful mischief. It is, to quote The Sweet Smell of Success, a cookie full of arsenic. Go ahead and take a bite.