Consider the logline: a 34-year-old, pre-diabetic, 250-pound, extremely anxious loner finds respite as a cleaning simp for dominatrices eager to belittle him as he tidies up their homes. Now think of the word simp: in Internet patois, a term denoting people prone to show excessive attention to someone who won’t reciprocate. If the premise sounds ripe for a voyeuristic spectacle, what’s most riveting about Denis Côté’s Paul is the documentary’s pointed refusal to infantilize its subject and his fantasies. For a portrait of a man whose primary sources of pleasure and validation are so tangled up with humiliation––verbal and physical––Paul treats its eponymous protagonist with nothing but dignity, and the results are oddly moving.
Then again, this isn’t the first time Côté has trained his camera on hot-button topics without giving in to sensationalism. With That Kind of Summer, the Quebecois filmmaker ventured into a community of nymphomaniacs trying to curb their urges, yet never played their struggles and insatiable desires for shock value. A few years prior, in A Skin So Soft, he turned to the world of bodybuilders, dogging a gaggle of weightlifters as they readied for a career-defining contest. Different as the two films were, they exemplified Côté’s refreshingly non-judgmental approach: sex or muscles addicts were never pegged as freaks or aberrations but ordinary people living quietly extraordinary lives. One never laughed at, but with them.
So it is with Paul. In the hands of a lesser director, this diaristic study of a simp and his interactions with a few Montreal-based mistresses would have likely come across as tawdry misery porn. In Côté’s, it emerges an uplifting, intermittently humorous ethnography of sorts. Photographed by Vincent Biron and François Messier-Rheault with a Blackmagic camera in largely static shots, the film toggles between glimpses of Paul’s daily routine and the clips he began recording ever since he decided to “change his life,” videos he’s been sharing on his Instagram page (CleaningSimpPaul, what else?) and which Côté disseminates throughout.
The two sources of footage make for some productive frictions. At one level, there’s a stark juxtaposition between the Blackmagic’s grainy, film-adjacent look and the crisp sheen of Paul’s online content. Yet there’s also a much deeper tension between the life Côté captures and Paul’s hardly NSFW social-media content. At no point is the material ever (porno)graphic. Paul, after all, does not seek gratification via sex, and his private encounters around the city are far more ludicrous than they are erotic. His kink, such as it is, isn’t just to serve “polite and condescending” women, but to “get to know a side of them others do not get to see,” as he confides to strangers and potential new clients online. And the dominatrices he serves are all unfailingly happy to reward him––a free haircut, a yoga lesson, or a friendly chat. It’s crucial that none of these aftercare moments feels staged; Paul and his bosses are bound by a sense of palpable affection and mutual understanding.
But for all the time it devotes to these outwardly humiliating cleaning sessions, Paul is just as interested in interrogating the kind of relationship that ties its titular guy to the camera. In one crucial passage, the thirty-something suggests he views his compulsive filmmaking as a way to master his life. (“Here I can control everything I post,” he says of his IG account. “I edit everything.”) Which is interesting to contrast with his readiness to let women enjoy free reign over his mind and body. Yet Paul itself never becomes an act of domination. In that, its protagonist’s grand design––to uncover facets of these women’s lives they would otherwise seldom make public––speaks to Côté’s own curiosity. There is a sense throughout Paul of a near-reverential attitude towards these rituals and their intricate choreographies. Côté’s filmmaking is so unobtrusive that the inclusion of a non-diegetic, Chilly Gonzales-styled piano ditty by Chantale Morin feels almost jarring, as do the few times the camera momentarily abandons Paul to focus on a few details around him: a fish tank, the frosted glass tiles of his living room window, some magnet words on his fridge arranged into a plea: “Can you break me?”
That magpie-like attention is nothing novel in Côté’s cinema, nor is the director’s ability to mine surrealism in his subjects’ everyday routines: one of the most indelible sequences in A Skin So Soft, in my book, found a few bodybuilders gazing at sheep while meditatively munching on carrots. What is new––and what, on second thought, makes Paul such a singular addition––is the humanist and life-affirming tone it exudes. Anecdotally, I saw the film as it unveiled in the Berlinale’s Panorama Documentary sidebar. It was the first Côté premiere I attended where majority of the questions at the post-screening debate were not raised at the filmmaker but his star, who was thanked for his “authenticity”––for speaking for so many others wrestling with depression and social anxiety. That too is a testament to the film’s equanimity. Whether Paul will sponge and address some of your own insecurities, it’s a strikingly affecting surprise.
Paul premiered at the 2025 Berlinale.