(18) 75min
(Peccadillo)

Pete (Peter Pittaros) is a young man on the make, a hustler with a nine inch appendage and a telephone patter that gets the customers banging on his Covent Garden flat door. Andrew Haigh’s film is half documentary, half fictitious exploration of a rent boy’s life. Shot mainly in close-up, the film exposes less the life of a male prostitute than intimately explores perhaps the problem of misplaced ambition and dispersed affections. Haigh’s film works because it manages that tricky combination of witholding judgement, but at the same time, in offering sympathy, wonders about the contradictions in Pete’s life that make hustling hardly an unequivocal lifestyle choice. Especially when you include the problem of gift-giving and receiving as Pete talks of people who see themselves as ‘gift-givers and receivers’, of transmitting, or becoming infected by HIV. Minimal extras.