Sean Baker

ANORA: human spirit vs the oligarchs

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Photo caption: Mark Eydelshteyn and Mikey Madison in ANORA. Courtesy of NEON.

In Sean Baker’s thrilling comedy Anora, Ani is a young Brooklyn lap dancer and escort who besots an even younger Russian customer, Ivan (Mark Eydelshteyn). Ivan is the son of a billionaire Russian oligarch, and the two spend several days, and countless thousands of Ivan’s unlimited fortune, partying. Ivan even impulsively takes Ani and four of their friends to Las Vegas on a luxury spree. There, Ivan convinces Ani to marry him before they return to Ivan’s NYC mansion.

But, just as they are settling into married life, Ivan’s parents catch wind of what is, to them, an unacceptably scandalous marriage and head to New York on their private jet. In the mean time, the parents order their NYC fixer and his team to corral the young lovebirds and undo the marriage.

Ani and Ivan are mismatched, but not because of his wealth and her poverty. The most important contrast between them is that he has never had to work or fight for anything, and she has worked and fought every day for her own survival.

Giggly, giddy and ever stoned, Ivan is spoiled and extremely immature; (he acts like his maturity was stunted at 13). This is a person who has never lived a moment of responsibility, nor has even a thought of responsibility crossed his mind. He sees a green card marriage as an escape from his Russian family and (horrors!) a future career as an oligarch-in-training. That’s a fantasy. Billionaires giveth and billionaires taketh away

The fixer (Karren Karagulian), his Armenian henchman (Vache Tovmasyan) and a Russian hooligan (Yura Borisov) arrive at the mansion and all hell breaks loose. From this moment, Anora, which has been very entertaining, vaults into a rollicking, hilarious thrill ride. Ani is a woman of uncommon spirit and is immediately too much for the oligarch’s Russian-speaking crew to handle.

Ani and the goons spend the next twelve hours on a raucous and hilarious nighttime manhunt through NYC that had the audience HOWLING with laughter – and this was a 4 PM weekday arthouse audience. I haven’t been in a theater audience that laughed so hard since Barbie.

And then there’s the last two minutes or so of the film, in which director Sean Baker sharply changes the tone of Anora. The audience was filing out, asking each other What was THAT? I thought that, given what Ani had experienced in the past forty-eight hours, Ani’s reaction in the ending was profoundly truthful, and elevated the movie from one of the year’s most fun movies to one of the best.

Anora springs from the mind of writer-director Sean Baker, whose signature is using first-time actors to tell the stories of people on the margins. His best films before Anora have been his first three: Starlet, about a young San Fernando Valley woman in the porn industry and her unlikely friendship, Tangerine, about two Hollywood Boulevard transgender hookers (shot on an iPhone), and The Florida Project, about latchkey kids in a poverty motel.

Mikey Madison (center) in ANORA. Courtesy of NEON.

Ani is a force of nature, and her spirit eventually earns her kindness from an unexpected source. Mikey Madison’s performance as Ani is stunning, bringing an aching humanity and authenticity to Ani and showcasing a remarkable gift for physical comedy. Madison stars in the TV series Better Things and played a bloodthirsty Manson Girl in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood… This is her first non-teenage starring role in a feature film.

Of the most significant roles, only Madison and the actors playing Ivan and his parents and the young Russian goon, Igor, (plus the tow truck driver) have substantial screen acting experience outside Sean Baker films. In just his fourth screen role, Tovmasyan is wonderfully watchable as the movie’s human piñata.

Mikey Madison and Yura Borisov in ANORA. Courtesy of NEON.

At first Yura Borisov’s Igor seems to be only what he is paid to be – a tagalong thug. But one of the pleasures of Anora is watching Igor regard the other characters and silently judge their behavior. Borisov starred in Compartment No. 6, one my favorite films of 2022. That film won the Grand Prix, essentially the second place award, at Cannes. This year, Anora won the top award at Cannes, the Palme D’Or. Quite a run for Borisov.

How often can a raunchy comedy win the Palme D’Or and contend for the Best Picture Oscar? Sean Baker and Mikey Madison are making that happen this tear with Anora.

RED ROCKET: a genius at burning bridges

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Photo caption: Simon Rex in RED ROCKET. Courtesy of A24.

The dark comedy Red Rocket is Sean Baker’s portrait of a human trainwreck named Mikey. Mikey is introduced when he steps off a bus, with no luggage and bearing the wounds of a fistfight he has lost, returning to his hometown of Texas City, Texas, after 17 years in Los Angeles. When he re-introduces himself to the locals, he is invariably met with an unhappy “What are you doing here?“. He is there because he is no longer viable as a porn star, and he has burned every available bridge in Southern California.

A fast talker with a gift for gab and flexibility with facts, Mikey begs for shelter from his estranged wife Lexy and her mom Lil; they greet Mikey with well-earned wariness. Mikey is one of those people who churn through life leaving a trail of relationship carnage. He’s always on the lookout for some opportunity for someone else to get him something he wants, regardless of the cost to the other person.

Mikey basically has the worldview of a pimp, and the plot in Red Rocket is basically whether he hurl himself into well-deserved self-destruction before he can damage folks who don’t deserve it, including Lexy, Lil, his dim-witted neighbor Lonnie and the underage target of his affections, Strawberry.

Mikey is a scumbag, and Red Rocket only works as entertainment because Simon Rex (who has worked in porn himself) is very good as the loquacious and pathetically self-absorbed Mikey.

Sean Baker’s trademark is making excellent movies (Tangerine, The Florida Project) with non-actors. Here, Bree Elrod (Lexy) and Suzanna Son (Strawberry) have some professional experience. Shih-Ching Tsou (Miss Phan the doughnut shop proprietor) is a longtime Sean Baker collaborator who has been a producer of his previous films and has bit parts in them.

The rest of the cast are first-timers. Brenda Deiss is perfect as Lil, and she doesn’t look or behave like any professional from Hollywood. Brittney Rodriguez is very funny as the tough-as-nails enforcer of a family dope ring, and she is compelling enough on screen to find a pace in other movies.

Baker makes Texas City into a character in his story. In virtually every exterior shot, the smokestacks of petrochemical plants are visible. (And it helps to know that Texas City is about a 35 to 40 hour $200 bus ride to and from LA.) Pickup trucks are very popular, but Mike has to make do with a bicycle.

Sean Baker is the writer, director and producer of Red Rocket and, unfortunately, its editor – it’s 20 minutes too long. Red Rocket is not nearly as good as Baker’s best – Tangerine and The Florida Project, but it’s pretty good.

Stream of the Week: STARLET – an odd couple with a surprising bond

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Besedka Johnson and Dree Hemingway in STARLET

Writer-director Sean Baker has created two indie hits in the past three years – the hilarious shot-on-an-iPhone trans comedy Tangerine and the crushingly authentic wild child drama The Florida Project.  Here is Baker’s lesser known gem.

In the indie relationship drama Starlet, a 21-year-old woman is living in a seedy part of the San Fernando Valley and working in an even sketchier industry, when she buys an old thermos from a woman sixty years older than she.  She finds a considerable sum of cash hidden within the thermos, keeps it, and, out of guilt, insinuates herself into the old woman’s life. The octogenarian is initially resistant, but a bond grows between them; each has a need that is revealed during the movie. It’s worth sitting back and going with the leisurely story, because the payoff at the end is surprisingly moving.

In her first movie credit, Besedka Johnson is astonishingly good as the older woman, both formidable and vulnerable. Sean Baker has, of course, gotten amazing performance out of non-actors in Tangerine and The Florida Project – it’s his gift, and it’s become his signature.

Dree Hemingway in STARLET

Model Dree Hemingway (daughter of Mariel and great-granddaughter of Ernest) demonstrates an engaging screen presence as the young woman. Stella Maeve is very convincing as the young woman’s nogoodnik roommate.

Starlet is available to stream from Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.

THE FLORIDA PROJECT: attention must be paid

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Willem Dafoe and Brooklynn Prince in THE FLORIDA PROJECT

The gripping and searingly authentic drama The Florida Project centers in the plight of six-year-olds living in a poverty motel in Orlando, Florida.  These are what we used to call “latchkey kids” – children unsupervised and essentially feral because their parents are focused on economic survival.

The parents, moored in multi-generational poverty and mostly classified as the working poor, understand that this situation is not ideal for the kids.  All the parents love their kids, and most take extra steps to protect them and to raise them with the right values.  These are people who are forced into unappealing choices – working multiple minimum wage jobs and leaving kids at home because they can’t access childcare, and even relocating and uprooting their kids from their friends and familiar environments.

These families are living literally in the shadow of Disney World, where tens of thousands of families are paying for $100 theme park tickets and $200 hotel rooms; the residents of the The Florida Project’s Magic Kingdom motel are paying $35 per night and can’t afford ice cream for their kids.

The kids are on their own to express their exuberance, curiosity and mischief.  Some of their misadventures are innocent and harmless, but some range to the very dangerous.  We see the kids’ moral compasses being forged, often not along the best axis.  Even the local Motel Row traffic is scary. The sketchy environs, with the anonymous transience of the tourists and with some of the locals in the criminal class, is even more foreboding.  For most of each day, the only responsible and caring adult is the beleaguered motel manager, Bobby (Willem Dafoe – great in this movie).  Here’s the effect on the audience – we enjoy the kids’ joy in play and exploration, but worry, along with Bobby, about their safety.

Brooklynn Prince (center) in THE FLORIDA PROJECT

The ringleader of the kid is the highly spirited Moonee.  Moonee is perfectly played by Brooklynn Prince, a very talented and charismatic child actor.

The smart and charming Moonee’s disadvantage is her Mom, Hallee (Bria Vinaite) – a tattooed and pierced woman in her early twenties.  Hallee is as immature as Moonee, and is basically a walking bundle of Bad Choices.  She has a terrible, irresponsible and entitled attitude, and always does things the easiest way in the short-term, regardless of legality or long-term consequence.  Hallee knows that she’s one more arrest from having Moonee taken away.   The term “unfit mother” has come to seem quaint – but not here, where the audience eventually starts begging for child welfare officials to rescue Moonee from her Mom.

The Florida Project was written, directed and edited by Sean Baker, who most recently made Tangerine, the movie he shot entirely on an iPhone (and you can’t tell).  In both The Florida Project and Tangerine, Baker uses first-time actors to tell a character-driven story about marginalized people.  Baker found Bria Vinaite, the non-actor who plays Hallee on Instagram.   It’s also the first screen credit for Mela Murder, who plays Ashley, a mom who is perceptive enough to ascertain that her son needs to disassociate from his best friend Moonee because of Hallee’s influence.

One of the minor beauties of The Florida Project is the whimsy of roadside vernacular architecture in Orlando, the tourist-hustling commercial buildings from the 1940s-1970s built as castles, ships, dogs and the like.

The Florida Project is close to a perfect movie, but not quite there.  Baker did edit his own movie, and one hour, 51 minutes is a little too long for this story.  And, two months after seeing the movie, I’m still not sure what I think about the controversial ending.  The movie has the feel of cinéma vérité until it doesn’t, when the audience is jarred by a sudden plunge into magical realism.  Unlike some viewers and critics, I thought that the ending did have a truthful consistency with the preceding story; but there’s no doubt that the abrupt change in tone pulls the audience out of being immersed in the story.

Still, The Florida Project is a Must See for its emotional power and its uncommonly authentic dive into an oft-ignored subculture.  As Willy Loman’s wife says in The Death of a Salesman, attention must be paid.

an offbeat choice for a Christmas movie

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TANGERINE
TANGERINE

Here’s an offbeat choice for a Christmas movie – the raucous and raunchy high energy comedy Tangerine is set on Christmas Eve.  Of course, it’s not a family movie in that it’s appropriate for children, but it is about families by choice.  Tangerine is available to stream from Amazon Instant, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.

Stream of the Week: TANGERINE: Two transgender hookers walk into a donut shop…

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TANGERINE
TANGERINE

Two transgender hookers walk into a donut shop in Hollywood…that’s not the start of a joke, but it’s the start of this pretty funny movie. The raucous and raunchy high energy comedy Tangerine centers on Alexandra and Sin-Dee, played respectively by the non-actors Mya Taylor and Kitana Kiki Rodriguez. Sin-Dee takes them on a quest to track down her wayward pimp/boyfriend, and, although Alexandra makes her promise “no drama”, you know that’s not gonna happen. Alexandra is focused on her own goal – her singing performance tonight at a local club. We also meet the Armenian cabbie Razmik (Karren Karagulian), who has his own secret. And did I mention that it’s Christmas Eve?

The two leads are wonderfully appealing and their misadventures are very funny.  A confrontation between an Armenian mother-in-law on the warpath, all the main characters and a pimp is wonderfully madcap.  The movie’s ending is surprisingly moving.

Tangerine was shot on an iPhone. This is not a gimmick. The intimacy and urgency of this character-driven movie is a good fit with the iPhone. There really isn’t any call for  helicopter shots or the like. The richness of the colors has been enhanced in post-production, so the iPhone cinematography isn’t any distraction at all. (See the shot below.)

You can stream Tangerine on Amazon Instant, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube, Google Play and some cable/satellite PPV.  (Or you can buy the DVD from a retailer.)

TANGERINE
TANGERINE

To follow the beginning of the film, it helps to know that “fish” is transgender slang for a person born with female anatomy.

There’s also an extremely funny cameo by Clu Gulager(!) as a loquacious taxi passenger.

Tangerine is written and directed by Sean Baker, who made Starlet, another indie about marginal Angelenos that I admired.

Tangerine is available to stream from Amazon Instant, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.