Hard sell

Rodrigue Jean on his epic doc Men
for Sale about male sex workers

ROUGH TRADE: Men for Sale

By MATTHEW HAYS

Interviewing filmmaker Rodrigue Jean is always an intense experience. The man cares so much about cinema, about the subjects he’s making films about, it’s often overwhelming.

His latest project is particularly captivating. Over a year-and-a-half period, Jean interviewed 11 male sex trade workers who hustle the streets of Montreal. The result, Men for Sale, is as illuminating as it is disturbing, and manages to avoid the stereotypes so often present in documentaries about the sex trade.

“When I first came to Montreal years ago, I met people who were selling sex,” Jean says. “The way they described their world to me, there was a lot of truth to it. Many of them were very vulnerable.” When Jean was living in Britain, he attempted to make a documentary about male sex workers but couldn’t find the funding. He revisited the idea a few years ago when an NFB producer floated the idea with him. He watched every documentary he could find about the sex trade (he has high praise for Hookers on Davie but gives low marks to 101 Rent Boys), and knew that when he made this film, he wanted it to be utterly respectful, non-exploitative and devoid of so many of the clichés that usually bog down films on the subject.

Jean began by approaching the Montreal AIDS organization Séro Zéro in order to figure out what the ethical parameters of such a project would be. And as he did his research and made contact with sex workers, Jean says there were certain commonalities that emerged. Most come from troubled backgrounds and, after falling into a bad drug habit, work the sex trade in order to get money for their fixes. He says these youth are “caught between the police and the mafia. These are the pimps who are living off the kids. They keep arresting them and putting them in jail. Clearly, the sex trade should be decriminalized. And the drug trade—the mafia is making loads of money off of drugs, precisely because they’re illegal.”

After the process of shooting the film—something Jean describes as overwhelming—Jean had a first cut of Men for Sale that was over eight hours long. He knew he was going to have to cut it. “I told my editor, boy, are they going to come down on us.”

What began then was what Jean refers to as an epic struggle with his financiers, both the NFB and their private-sector partner. “The NFB now does not have enough money, so they’ve been forced to forge alliances with the private sector in order to fund projects. It’s almost an alliance made in hell.”

The main problem? The producers were asking that the film fit a broadcast format, which would mean seriously editing down Men for Sale. “But it wasn’t just about time. It would mean cutting out certain things from the film, things that would lessen its overall impact. In Britain, when a filmmaker comes up with something strong, they change the format for TV, allowing things to go longer.

“Not in Canada, where I sense we’re a country that lives in fear. This country is so afraid of anything that doesn’t conform to convention. We’re a proper colony of the U.S., like some kind of suburb. Always waiting for permission to do anything, like we’re afraid to upset our masters.”

THE UNCUT VERSION OF MEN FOR
SALE OPENS THIS FRIDAY, SEPT. 25