Sean Baker

Anora: Visit Your Local Poling Place

Jeremy BeckReviews
Mark Eydelshteyn and Mikey Madison in Anora

The opening shot of Sean Baker’s Anora finds the camera dollying along a row of champagne booths at a strip club, clinically observing a scene of stylish debauchery. The music is loud, the light is low, and the exotic dancers are gyrating with plastered smiles, pantomiming their pleasure while internally checking their watch. Given that this display is preceded by an austere title card informing audiences that the film has received one of the most prestigious prizes in cinema (the Palme d’Or at Cannes), you might think that the ensuing picture will be a squalid story of misery and disenchantment—an exposé revealing the predatory nature of the strip-club industry and the meager circumstances of the women whom it chews up and spits out. Surely this widely acclaimed and undoubtedly serious movie can’t be… fun?

But Baker, continuing his hot streak in the wake of The Florida Project and Red Rocket, demolishes his viewers’ assumptions as cannily as he develops his characters. It is true that Anora is a thoughtful and incisive work, exploring its drably decadent milieu with persuasive rigor. It is also, by and large, a blast—a ribald comedy that hums with playfulness and dynamism. It turns you on and pulls you in. Read More

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Red Rocket: A Star Is Porn

Jeremy BeckReviews
Simon Rex and Suzanna Son in Red Rocket

Cognitive dissonance is a valuable artistic tool, but there’s something especially fascinating about Sean Baker’s Red Rocket, which is one of the most enjoyably disturbing—and disturbingly enjoyable—movies I’ve seen in quite some time. On one level, it’s a blaring warning beacon—a chillingly persuasive portrait of exploitation and predation. Yet it’s also a pleasingly relaxed hangout comedy—a sun-kissed ode to the eternal pleasures of sex and drugs and NSYNC. It’s appalling and enthralling; I was aghast watching it and can’t wait to see it again.

The force of nature who provides Red Rocket with its queasy allure is Simon Rex, a journeyman actor and chiseled beefcake whom I’ve never seen before but will almost certainly be seeing again. Armed with a rippling chest and a wolfish smile, Rex plays the coyly named Mikey Saber, a washed-up porn star crawling back home to his impoverished roots in Texas City, where he attempts to shack up with his estranged wife (Bree Elrod); unable to secure legal employment thanks to the lengthy gap in his résumé (“You can call Brazzers and ask for a pay stub…”), he starts scratching out a living by selling weed to local oil riggers. He also manages to ingratiate himself with his wife and her couch-potato mother (Brenda Deiss), thanks to his rugged charm, not to mention his other talents. As his prior occupation suggests, Mikey is good with his dick and also slick with his words, which helps compensate for the black hole where his soul should be. Read More

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The Florida Project: The Tragic Kingdom

Jeremy BeckReviews
Willem Dafoe and Brooklynn Kimberly Prince in "The Florida Project"

It’s a funny thing, how a movie can sneak up on you. Take The Florida Project, Sean Baker’s striking and incrementally devastating new film, which transpires over the course of a languid summer in a low-rent motel complex just outside of Orlando. An attentive humanist with a keen eye for illuminative details, Baker is committed to conveying the sweaty tedium that afflicts his hard-luck characters. In fact, he so convincingly captures the housing development’s collective lethargy—the sweltering heat, the pervasive boredom, the maddening feeling of having nothing to do—that he is almost too successful. For the first half hour that I spent watching these restless children scampering around bland parking lots and darting through paint-peeling hallways, I found myself stifling a yawn. So imagine my surprise when, as the movie barreled into its mesmerizing climax, tears welled in my eyes and my heart pounded in my chest. The Florida Project starts with a snooze. It ends with a sledgehammer.

Not that its beginning is entirely disposable. Even when the movie flirts with narrative monotony, it always offers something visually arresting. Baker’s last film was Tangerine, a day-in-the-life story that was notable not just because it starred two transgender actresses, but because it was shot entirely on an iPhone. The Florida Project, by contrast, is triumphantly widescreen, with a brilliantly vivid palette and elegantly composed frames that recall the formal mastery of Raise the Red Lantern. The opening act essentially functions as a tour of the neighborhood, a candy-colored district dotted with dopily themed motels, indistinguishable strip malls, and rinky-dink food stands. The pastels keep popping, from the cheery orange glow of a grocery to the powder blue of a gift shop to the gentle lavender of the titular housing complex, a bleak and raucous purgatory called The Magic Castle. Read More

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