Sebastián Silva Might As Well Be Rotting in the Sun
Sebastián Silva wants to kill himself. Jordan Firstman wants to team up with Sebastián on his nascent television project. The parade of horny men at the gay nude beach resort where Sebastián and Jordan meet wants a good time from both, slinging their prominently framed dicks around in greeting, promising non-stop public dalliances supplemented with a ketamine diet. How this set-up transitions into the closest thing to a neo-noir in Silva’s filmography is what makes his new movie, Rotting in the Sun, so special; he pulls off a daring hopscotch from influencer satire to paranoiac tragedy with a nonchalant ease that would feel boastful if it wasn’t so damn good.
Where truth ends and cinema begins is a matter best left to Silva, who, playing a version of himself here, may or may not be calling on his own experiences as a gay man growing up in 1980s Santiago. The truth of the matter is irrelevant to Rotting in the Sun. The movie’s metatext behaves like a Möbius strip made of mirror tiles, each detail looping back on itself while reflecting the others, or maybe vice versa; watch the film three times and each time you’ll walk away with a completely different understanding of what it’s saying, which feels fitting. That’s how social media works, too.
The meet-cute, in this case more of a meet-ugly, between Silva and Firstman takes place during a brush with death: Firstman, caught in a riptide and in mortal peril, nearly drowns, but Silva saves him; having just watched Crystal Fairy and the Magical Cactus, Silva’s 2013 cringe comedy, Firstman interprets the rescue as kismet. From there, he devotes his every moment to courting Silva in the tradition of grade-school flirting, except instead of making Silva eat dirt, he films him doing drugs and posts it on Instagram for his followers to delight over. Silva, who takes himself Very Seriously as a Serious Artist, bristles at the invasion and ridicules Firstman for his hollow social media spectacles, but eventually relents and agrees to work on Firstman’s series-in-progress, which he promptly ridicules both to Firstman’s face and in his private journals.
Silva eagerly characterizes his screen counterpart as a massive self-pitying asshole who keeps company with other assholes, like Mateo (Mateo Riesta), his friend and landlord, who addresses him with a slur about as often as “Sebastián,” and verbally destroys his paintings to the point that the damage done to them by their perpetually befuddled housekeeper Vero (Catalina Saavedra) doesn’t seem so bad by comparison. Firstman’s gravitation toward Silva feels like a natural phenomenon. But Firstman is a self-described happy clown, and Silva is a sad clown, or at best a grumpy, fun-killing clown; the attraction, one-sided to start until Silva grows desperate to work on a new production, reads as dangerously incongruous.