Men For Sale

Voulez-vous coucher avec moi? - Anthony in Men For Sale
 
Time Investment: 145 min.
Return on Investment: 60 min.
 
After a heavy run on the festival circuit, French-Canadian filmmaker Rodrigue Jean’s laborious diary of Montréal sex workers, Men for Sale, finally gets released on DVD from Breaking Glass Pictures. The film has received considerable buzz for actually managing to corral 11 unnamed street hustlers and get them to talk candidly on camera about their lives—from how they got into the seedy biz to their extended drug use—every month for a year. This is no glorified portrayal of gay-for-pay sex workers. These guys are beat up, worn out and hard-to-watch addicts who’ll do anything to get their next high. For almost all the boys (each in his early twenties—except one —and looks much older), their tales are very similar: broken homes to foster care to life on the streets. They want to beat their assorted addictions for their girl/mom/ baby but don’t have either the will power or the guts to live a clean life.
 
Feeling pity? Don’t. Because you know that as long as people will pay for sex, tragic lives like theirs will continue to exist. And the exhaustive film—over two hours of interviews and not much besides mood-establishing street scenes—is difficult to watch, with its extreme close-ups of chain smoking, pockmarked skin and bad teeth. Men for Sale knows nothing can help these lost shadows—a fact that makes the viewer feel as voyeuristic as their Johns—but only tries to prove that in a world that chooses to ignore them, these boys do indeed exist. —BS