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| Denis Côté: 'I'm a formalist director, I like to organise reality to make it fit inside what I imagine' Photo: © Coop Vidéo de Montréal |
The work of Canadian director Denis Côté has always been a mixture of fact and fiction – quite often in the same film – it’s an often quirky approach that is a perfect fit for the subject of his latest documentary Paul, which had its premiere at the Berlinale and recently screened at Thessaloniki International Documentary Festival.
Paul, is a single with a troubled health history, something which he has been open about via videos with his many followers online, and has embarked on an unusual method of self-improvement. Describing himself as a “cleaning simp”, this involves cleaning houses for a series of women, chiefly dominatrices, for free, while engaging in submissive behaviour around them. Côté opens a non-judgemental window into Paul’s world, which is a lot less passive than the description above might suggest.
Chatting in Thessaloniki about the BDSM world, Côté explains: “Let's say I have my little basics. I'm not in the BDSM world but let's say I've experienced a little BDSM or a swinging lifestyle, just a little. I'm not saying that to brag or whatever, but it helps you be totally open about alternative lifestyles and alternative sexualities.
“You start respecting everybody's kinks. You're not completely shocked when you hear about somebody whose kink is rubbing herself with doughnuts or whatever. And the world of simps… I had heard about it. So you see this little crust or basics of knowing about these things helps you enter that world in a much more respectful, empathic way.”
Paul’s world was something he stumbled on via a woman he was dating at the time. He recalls: “At some point she said, ‘Oh I'm really tired, I'm gonna call Paul.’ … ‘Who's Paul?’ ‘Oh, he's going to give me a lift.’ ‘Okay.’ It was 1am. The second time she had big bags, and she said, ‘I'm gonna call Paul.’ I said, ‘Hey, sit down, who’s Paul?’
“She told me that Paul is this guy she met, because she was coordinating the meetings for a dominatrix somewhere for two months and when she stopped, she met Paul and Paul said, ‘Madam, if you need a lift, you call me any time.’ I said, okay, When I heard about that, I could feel there was a subject, a dangerous one.
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| Denis Côté: 'I like to be connected just to stay relevant' Photo: Courtesy of Thessaloniki Film Festival/Studio Aris Rammos |
“But I made a film with bodybuilders a few years ago (Skin So Soft) and I walked a thin line between exploitation/voyeurism and it's pretty exciting because you never know where you're going to miss the point or become totally voyeuristic and it's fun to walk that line. So I thought since I made that film, I think I have enough experience to enter the world of this so-called guy called Paul and do something.
“But I was three months away from having a kidney transplant. I was too sick so I kept this email on my desk and I stopped seeing the girl, so suddenly I had a new kidney. I invited the guy on my terrace and I said, ‘Paul can you tell me your whole life?’”
That was a pretty big request, given that Paul is much more comfortable with women than men, although, as he told an audience in Berlin, when he attended with Côté, it was a desire to get out of his comfort zone.
Côté adds: “But the problem was me – being a tall, straight, tattooed guy with an outgoing personality is, for him, very intimidating. I'm not saying he wants to be famous, that's not what I'm saying and he doesn't like me saying that – but he wanted to try it and the guy is completely obsessed with having new followers on Instagram.
“The contradiction is he wants the followers, but he doesn't want to meet them. He doesn't want to go outside in the world to meet them. So, I think he saw the film as a personal opportunity and making a film is always the exploitation of a subject so I didn't mind trying it with him.
“I talked to my DP, we were the only two people on set – the film was made for $1500, with some help from the government afterwards. I said, ‘Let’s make it in the most delicate way, totally observational, Let's not be surprised by anything that's going to happen’.
“Documentaries are documentaries so you need to plan some stuff, things are not happening by magic in front of your camera, despite what people are thinking. And we saw what we needed to see.”
In the film, Paul says, “My life is cinema now”, which is particularly interesting within the context of his life, where performance is already part of the equation, not just in his relationship with the various women he cleans for – who create their own content for sites such as Only Fans – but also in terms of his own reels and videos that he puts online.
“He needs control,” says Côté. “He’s a submissive but he has a lot of control because the submissive kind in these things are the ones who are setting the rules most of the time. So in the case of this film, usually he's controlling everything, he has DaVinci (an editing program) at home. He's a good editor. He knows what he wants the world to see.
“Suddenly there's this big guy making a film about him and he has no control. So, I'm still amazed that he wanted to do it. He never watched any of my films even if I proposed it. He doesn't want to know who I am. He was talking to me in a very yes/no way, his emails were just a few words. And I used a woman as a production manager. And at night you would talk to her on the phone for an hour and then she would call me and report. That was so weird.
“So I would enter his house and talk to him in a little bit of a condescending way saying, ‘Hey Paul you look good. I watched your last reel. You look good. If you don't mind, we're going to do this with Miss Jasmine’. ‘Yeah. Yeah’.
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| Denis Côté: 'If Paul came and sat here, he would be totally bored because reality is boring' Photo: © Coop Vidéo de Montréal |
When I previously Côté, he told me: “I think all my films are fiction because I have a strong desire for it.”
That makes this film particularly fascinating as the fictions are already baked in, given that there’s a level of roleplay and performance between Paul and the women.
“Let’s talk about ego,” the director suggests. “Sometimes you think you're going to make a documentary but what’s your level of trust with reality? It’s stressful because you never know if reality will give you enough for your film. So being a fiction filmmaker, I'm always this close to trying to trick reality or to put some signs here and there and to control things. I'm a formalist director, I like to organise reality to make it fit inside what I imagine. So, with this film, Paul was giving me a lot but it felt like it was not even enough. I had to come up with this burlesque dancer thing. I think it's nice in the film. It's interesting, but you can always feel there's a fiction filmmaker behind.
“The film was shot super-quickly. It was 17 days and seven months. So I prepare in a fictional way documentary material and that has to do with ego and control, I think. But this time I had a guy who was fixing the limits. So it's very weird for me. Am I the submissive in that situation? It’s possible. Maybe Paul was the dominant in that situation. There were so many contradictions in that proposition.
“Now that the film is over, in Berlin, people loved the film in such a way. I've never experienced that for any of my films. With most of them, people clap. They look at me. What does he want to say? It was a bit experimental. They go home, they think about it. They give me some shit on Letterboxd, that's usually my experience. Suddenly, I had a lovely guy, who's very courageous in the film. He's very open about his problems and he's generous about everything and people were clapping and loving him in Berlin. Him.
“So I had to take three steps out and be like, ‘Okay, take the stage’. I'm not used to that because we all have egos. None of my films are real, real documentaries. This would be the biggest one. So some people say it's more conventional.”
Talking about the levels of performance in the film, the director notes that there were some things that came as a revelation to him.
He says: “You're opening a door about the transactional nature of that project, and that caught me by surprise. That and the relationship to social media. I thought I was just making a film about this guy being a submissive and it's original because he's cleaning. I thought that was the end of my project. Then meeting these women, they're all in the middle of a transaction with Paul. Like Miss Jasmine, the first one with the unicorn thing, I was like, ‘What is she doing?; She told us beforehand, because, of course, if we visited her, we know what's going to happen, although not in detail.
“She said, ‘I want to do Christmas content.’ And I asked my DP, ‘We're supposed to film Christmas content today? He said, ‘Well, Denis, content always means they do stuff for their Only Fans or stuff like that. So, okay, Christmas content, let's see. So I understood that Paul is giving her a free cleaning, and in exchange, she's using him to create some short videos to go find clients, who will pay $400 an hour to do what Paul is doing. So, he's the actor. It's a huge transaction.
“And then other women. ‘Okay, give me a free cleaning and I'll give you something, Paul. You want a beating? I'll give you a beating’. So it's always a transaction and sometimes I would ask them, ‘Is Paul your friend?’. They were like, ‘No’. It’s a weird world of consent transactions… and everybody is living with their phone. Their phone is the extension of their arms. Yeah. So if Paul came and sat here, he would be totally bored because reality is boring.
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| Paul Poster |
Although he notes there’s a lot of empathy that stems from Paul himself, Côté says that he’s looking at his life “not in a cold way, but detached, I'm not there to do any psychology. I'm not there to sell you something. If Paul wants to get out of his anxiety, he's going to find keys by himself. My film is not there to save him”.
He adds: “I'm giving this interview and I can still say Paul somehow is an enigma to me. Which is okay. A lot of people make documentaries over a period of four years, they try to discover everything there is to discover about someone or a situation.I'm not a scientist. I'm not a psychologist. I'm not healing Paul. But hopefully it's not voyeuristic, hopefully it's not exploitation.
“Being 51, you want to stay relevant making films, you need to be connected with all this social media stuff, these kinks, the way people live their sexuality today when they're 23 years old. I like to be connected just to stay relevant.
“Making this film for me was not a big shock, it was just discovering and respecting other people's way of living and that's how you stay young.”
We spoke to Denis Côté at Thessaloniki International Documentary Festival. Paul will screen at CPH:Dox on March 23 and 30, Cinema du Reel in Paris on March 24 and 27, then Visions du Reel and Hong Kong International Film Festival in April
