Aleksandr's Price (2013)

Told by way of a few retrospectives with his shrink “Mary” (Anatoli Grigoriadou) we follow the rather depressing tale of the handsome young “Aleksandr” (auteur Pau Masó) as he comes to terms with a tragedy and takes to the clubs of New York City to find some solace. It doesn’t take him long before he meets straight man “Keith” (Josh Berresford) who is prepared to shell out $600 for a few hours entertainment and though initially shocked by being offered cash for sex, he quickly accepts this as a way to make ends meet - although some of the other characters he encounters are much less generous and much more perfunctory, even violent, and that sees him driven to a drug habit that he is struggling to contain. His one hope might be the seemingly decent “Tom” (Keith Dougherty) but just how long that man’s patience will last with his emotionally unstable young friend is anyone’s guess. This film is obviously a labour of love for Masó, but he is just too close to the proceedings to step back and be objective about what he creates. Sadly, that leaves us with a sterile, self-indulgent, trawl through the seamy lives of the hookering class with sexual scenes so heavily stylised and unnatural looking as to ensure they come across as art for art’s sake. His character isn’t developed anywhere near enough for us to really care about him or his predicament and though it needn’t have been graphic, it could have been far more authentically visualised rather than half an hour’s worth of him wandering around the streets looking every inch the successful young lad about town. It touches on things, but it goes nowhere with these themes and after about half an hour I’d simply lost interest.

This is about a guy who found himself in a desperate situation so he turned to prostitution to get by, but the bigger story was really the breakdown of his mental health.