Last month I wrote about British film-maker Mike Leigh creating a “string of perfectly crafted dramas with an uncanny element of verisimilitude” – dramas such as the 1996 Palme d’Or winner Secrets & Lies, which went on to win five Oscar nominations including best picture. It’s no surprise to learn that one of Leigh’s greatest admirers is Sean Baker, the American independent director (born in New Jersey in 1971) whose most recent feature, Anora, similarly scooped the Palme d’Or last May and is now shaping up as an Oscars frontrunner.
Although their film-making styles are distinctly different, Baker and Leigh share a guiding dramatic principal: to portray real people in real situations with which the audience can empathise. Take Baker’s 2015 masterpiece Tangerine, the breakout feature that built upon the festival successes of his Prince of Broadway (2008) and the Independent Spirit awards prize winner Starlet (2012). Shot on modified iPhone 5Ss with prototype widescreen anamorphic lenses, Tangerine captured a magically authentic portrait of life in the streets, burger bars and doughnut joints of Los Angeles.
Screen newcomer Kitana Kiki Rodriguez brings a punchy authenticity to the role of Sin-Dee Rella, a transgender sex worker on a Christmas Eve warpath for her pimp boyfriend. Meanwhile, best friend Alexandra (Mya Taylor), who is attempting to ready herself for an evening singing gig, is dragged into the smart-mouthed chaos of Sin-Dee’s festive mission.
For my money, Tangerine, a modern Christmas movie classic, is up there with Jim McBride’s Breathless (1983) as one of the great screen portrayals of LA – a city far removed from the homegrown environs of Leigh’s London-set dramas High Hopes (1988) and Secrets & Lies. Yet as Baker told Film Comment magazine in 2015, those were the two movies that served as his inspirational touchstones for Tangerine. “To be very transparent,” Baker confessed, “I was thinking Mike Leigh all the way”, adding that his greatest influences were “the British social realists”.
The quality that binds Baker’s films with those of Leigh and his British contemporary Ken Loach (“I think you can see a lot of Ken Loach in Prince of Broadway,” Baker also said) is the ability to place traditionally marginalised characters centre stage. Nowhere is this more apparent than in his thrillingly vibrant 2017 feature The Florida Project, a wonderful humanist work that the director has compared to “a modern-day Our Gang”, invoking the Great Depression-era Hal Roach shorts in which impoverished yet resourceful kids broke new cinematic ground in surprisingly naturalistic fashion.
In The Florida Project, Baker focuses on Moonee (Brooklynn Prince), an energy-filled six-year-old who lives with her mother in the gaudy Magic Castle motel, beyond the walled boundaries of Walt Disney World. Moonee’s mom, Halley, played by Instagram discovery Bria Vinaite, is a dancer and chancer who makes ends meet any way she can – hawking perfume to rich resort customers, stealing theme park entry passes from wide-eyed tourists, and more. These characters may live a hardscrabble hand-to-mouth existence, but Baker and cinematographer Alexis Zabé find heart-stopping beauty amid the decaying DayGlo weirdness. As Moonee says of a misshapen tree that seems to embody her hopes and dreams; “Do you know why this is my favourite tree? ’Cause it tipped over, and it’s still growing.”
You can draw a direct line between Vinaite’s Halley and Mikey Madison’s titular heroine in Anora – a fiery role for which Madison is now a hotly tipped Oscar favourite. She excels as an enterprising New York table dancer and escort who becomes embroiled in a dark fairytale anti-romance (think Pretty Woman meets Eastern Promises via The French Connection) with the spoilt-brat son of a Russian oligarch – an allegiance that turns from ditsy to dangerous in the blink of an eye. In typical Baker fashion, Anora, which is variously tense, frank, horrifying and occasionally hilarious, turns a believable spotlight on characters who would be mere window dressing for other film-makers.
Having dealt with the subject of sex workers in previous movies, most recently 2021’s Red Rocket, in which Simon Rex plays a just-past-it porn star whose life is unravelling in tragicomic fashion, Baker enlisted Canadian writer-actor Andrea Werhun (author of the 2018 “memoir-cum-art book” Modern Whore) to serve as creative consultant on Anora. The result is a film that mixes elements of a violent screwball comedy with an all too believable portrait of a strong-spirited woman making her way in an often brutal world. As Werhun observed; “On film, sex workers are usually depicted as victims, villains, hookers with hearts of gold or, well, dead. Sean managed to defy these tired stereotypes by paying sex workers to check his work, [creating] a must-see portrayal of sex work that is both rare and riveting.”
Baker is now exec-producing a screen adaptation of Werhun’s book, directed by the writer’s long-time visual collaborator Nicole Bazuin. Meanwhile, Anora looks set to earn Baker his first Oscar nomination. That’s an accolade that is long overdue.
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All titles in bold are available to stream, except Anora, still in UK cinemas and coming to Apple TV+ on 20 January
What I’m also enjoying
FitkinWall: Uist
(NXN)
After bingeing Scottish musician Ruth Wall’s The Three Harps of Christmas album through the festive period, I now have this 2024 release from Wall and partner Graham Fitkin on repeat play. It’s a haunting blend of Gaelic melodies and timeless electronica soundscapes that get right inside your head, and your heart.
Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl
(BBC iPlayer)
As with all of Aardman’s stop-motion animations, the more you watch, the more you see – and I guarantee people will be rewatching this latest Wallace & Gromit romp for years to come, and finding new blink-and-you’ll-miss-them sight gags every time.
Source: theguardian.com
