A powerful documentary well worth the wait. Over a year, young Montreal hustlers agreed to recount their anxieties and life stories to Rodrigue Jean. Men for Sale is that rare film that presents an honest account of a disturbing social reality, challenging our consciences and reminding us how film can be a remarkable tool for intervention when it immerses itself in the truth.
 
Action Séro Zéro is a Montreal community organization that provides free healthcare and HIV prevention services. It helped give the director access to these young male sex workers and their “outlaw” stories, which reveal a troubling portrait of lost youth and survival in a chaotic and ruthless urban jungle. These young men from troubled backgrounds have been subject to all kinds of abuse. Harassed and stigmatized by a society that coldly uses their bodies and caught in the spiral of easy money, they resort to drugs to dull the pain. Some try to claw back their non-existent childhood by forming bonds with others, but their past undermines attempt at love and friendship. Although their lives are underpinned by an amazing energy, they are caught in a vicious circle and painfully aware of their limited future.
 
A distillation of lengthy footage required to foster solid relationships with his participants, the film rewards Jean’s persistence and delivers an intimate and unflinching look at the hardscrabble lives of hustlers in downtown Montreal. They are filmed full-face, their backs to a plate-glass window looking out onto the city streets, locus of their existence. Only one man refuses to be filmed full-face, but his words more than compensate. Another, once a porn star abroad, shows us his modest apartment where he receives clients, while elsewhere the men are filmed in safe places where they can open up to the filmmaker. Rodrigue Jean is not new to this experience: In the 1990s, he guided video workshops with young hustlers in London, so he understands the delicate link between filmmaker and participants. Filtering their haunting, heart-rending and sometimes humorous testimonies through a respectful distance, he listens attentively, non-judgmentally, with neither voyeurism nor false sympathy.
 
The film also weighs up the world in the background, a throwaway society addicted to consumption. Predatory capitalism feeds off the physical and emotional suffering of the abandoned, one of whom compares the city’s fireworks display to a third world war, intuitively grasping the violence around him. Men for Sale is a dissident voice in the face of brutality.
 
The film is both a subversive counter-current to social attitudes and a pact of trust. Rodrigue Jean got to know the young hustlers over a year, filming with a skeleton crew and taking the time to listen, his camera and microphone acknowledging their oft-denied existence. We are struck by the truth of their words and the complexity of their lives. Often filmed in close-up, their faces are animated by a touching beauty.
 
With Men for Sale, Jean offers a form of contract with the viewer: Film is there to learn from the marginalized and give something back. This is the only, albeit modest, way it can react to the injustices of our time.