Well-known for his realistic and profound portraits of marginalized communities, Sean Baker explores the complex humanity behind stories often ignored by the mainstream, while redefining contemporary independent cinema. Film critic Andrei Gorzo writes about Baker’s sensitive and honest approach, from the life of sex workers in Starlet and Tangerine, to the childhood marked by dreams and hardships in The Florida Project, to the recent Palme d’Or-winning Anora at Cannes. (Disclaimer: the article contains some spoilers).

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Sean Baker’s debut film, Four Letter Words, came out in 2000. Consisting only of dialogue, it revolves around the camaraderie rituals of a group of middle-class white males, former high school classmates barely (but not really) out of adolescence. The film opens with a guy throwing up – at 3 in the morning, in between two topics of conversation: favourite porn scenes and former high school girls they wanted to bang. In other words, Four Letter Words (which Baker also edited) inhabits a narrow thematic territory, already thoroughly explored at the time by Kevin Smith and occasionally others (Richard Linklater, Doug Liman). And it didn’t stand out. 

Viewed today, it only sporadically foreshadows Baker’s later world – see the scene with the gas station clerk talking on the phone in Russian while a customer waits to be attended to. The gas station clerk is played by Karren Karagulian (listed as Kevin in the end credits), an Armenian collaborator of Baker’s who will recur in all of his subsequent films, displaying a virile yet anxious air and a heart-shaped birthmark on his right cheek. Also in the credits, Sean Baker thanks his then-partner and former classmate at New York University, Taiwanese-American filmmaker Shih-Ching Tsou, “for saving me”.

Slipping is fatal when there’s no lower rung on the social ladder to fall to

With Take Out, released in 2004 and co-directed with Shih-Ching Tsou, Baker becomes the filmmaker known today. He continues working in a lo-fi, arte povera regime, on a micro-budget (this time shooting on digital instead of film, as he had for Four Letter Words), but no longer documents his own relatively privileged milieu. While staying partially within fiction, he documents the world of undocumented, non-English-speaking Chinese immigrants, deeply indebted to the smugglers who brought them to the United States to deliver Chinese food by bicycle from morning till night. Take Out depicts a day – a grim and rainy one – in the life of such a delivery worker (Charles Jang), who has to collect $150 in tips by the end of the day to pay off his debt. It’s a modern-day Bicycle Thieves – even more relevant in 2024 than it was in 2004. There are some plot twists towards the end – first a misfortune, then a saving intervention – but up to that point, the drama lies strictly in the rain that comes and goes, the doors the deliveryman knocks on, the various faces of customers (some look at him suspiciously, most don’t even see him), and the counted bills and coins.

In 1949, when Bicycle Thieves came out, André Bazin wrote that De Sica’s film was communist precisely because it wasn’t overtly communist: any condemnation of the economic and social order responsible for the protagonist’s situation remains implicit. Likewise in Take Out: nothing explicitly accusatory. Baker’s stated goal is to make these invisible people visible – people whose faces you don’t even look at while handing over cash for your takeout, people whose disappearance no one would report. Of course, the very act of taking a camera to places other filmmakers ignore and filming such misfits and precarious individuals (not in safari mode, as that’s for the wealthy, but guerrilla-style, without money or permits) is a political stance. Baker himself handled the film’s cinematography. The visual aesthetic is Dogma-Dardenne – Dardenne in their arte povera phase, as in Rosetta (1999), but without long takes, instead with many cuts and framing that suggests it was filmed clandestinely. There are no apparent flourishes, yet a stealthy aestheticism appears as colours start to bleed and blend when depicting night-time, rainy scenes. It’s no coincidence that critic Joseph Pomp Pomp suggested (in his article for Los Angeles Review of Books) calling this 21st-century Neo-Neo Realism “Neon-Neo Realism”.

Baker’s next film, Prince of Broadway (2008), is also set in New York, also in grim weather, and again follows an undocumented individual: Lucky, played by Prince Adu (an immigrant from Ghana), is a hustler – approaching people on the street and trying to lure them into a store that sells name brand knock-offs. (Karagulian, Baker’s ever-present Armenian, runs the shop.) As in Take Out, much of the dialogue is improvised, but Prince of Broadway brings a new element to the script (co-written by Baker with Darren Dean): it bears similarities to a certain Hollywood heartwarming formula.

Lucky’s life changes when an ex-girlfriend shows up with the son he never knew he had, leaving him in his care for a while. So, the “part-time dad” formula: an immature man reluctantly accepts fatherly duties, which eventually end up making him more responsible. While a Hollywood remake of Take Out is practically inconceivable, one of Prince of Broadway is imaginable – starring Will Smith, for example. And this isn’t the last time we’ll see Baker experimenting with narratives close to a potentially syrupy formula: Prince of Broadway is followed by Starlet, a film about the friendship between an optimistic porn star and an 85-year-old woman, respectable yet snarky and standoffish – a perfect example of the “odd couple” formula, a great combo by their very incompatibility.

But even when he ventures into fairytale-like elements, Baker remains committed to his project of documenting underground industries and protagonists who are fundamentally different from the characters played by Will Smith. In Baker’s filmography, Lucky’s portrayal aligns with that of the young, single, unemployed mother in The Florida Project (Halley, played by Bria Vinaite) and the porn actor in Red Rocket (Mikey “Saber” Davies, played by Simon Rex). Lucky and Mickey are both hustlers, living off tricking and deceiving. As people responsible for their actions, one of them is reformable, while the other is incorrigible and unforgivably manipulative. But both are trapped in a vicious cycle of social disadvantage and poor personal choices, in a world that offers no social safety net, and therefore little room to make mistakes.

The young mother in The Florida Project is deemed an irresponsible parent and her six-year-old daughter is taken from her. Indeed, she’d ended up prostituting in the very motel room she shared with her daughter, asking the girl to play with her toys in the bath while she handled a client. And, since the little girl was often left to wander unsupervised, to grow up somewhat wild, she once set fire to some abandoned buildings. On the other hand, they clearly love each other and are happy together. An ex-stripper fired for not wanting to sleep with clients (or so she says), Halley only turned to prostitution as a last resort. Until then, she had always managed to get by without it. She sold counterfeit perfumes in the parking lots of upscale hotels to pay for the motel. She and her daughter ate leftovers from a fast-food place where her friend, also a single mother, had landed a waitressing job. She struggled and improvised, but with optimism – they laughed a lot together.

What quickly becomes apparent is that the protagonist, no matter how hard she tries, is going nowhere. She’s not even standing still but rather sinking, without realising it. And there’s nothing to hold onto because the America she lives in seems to have abandoned people in her social class. The other motel residents don’t seem to be in a better situation. Many of them are also raising children alone, children they had very young. They at least have jobs they cling to – slipping is fatal when there’s no lower rung on the social ladder to fall to.

Coast to Coast: The Disinherited of the American Dream

Before discussing The Florida Project (2017) in depth, which may be Baker’s most dystopian American portrayal, let’s briefly touch on Starlet (2012) and Tangerine (2015), two films set in Los Angeles, where the former is the most optimistic in his entire filmography. Starlet – a film about the need for companionship – is set in Hollywood, but Baker still focuses on the marginalised. His Hollywood is one of bingo halls and porn showrooms. The heroine (Dree Hemingway) and the couple she shares an apartment with (James Ransome and Stella Maeve) are people who, from a middle-class perspective, are sometimes described as “trashy”.

All three work in the porn industry; her flatmate also sells drugs, and his partner supplements her income through sex work. While Ransome’s character is a bit of a deadbeat, and Maeve’s character is too stoned to perform well on set, the heroine is level-headed, competent, and bright. As a porn actress, she’s an enthusiastic beginner with only positive experiences so far. She eagerly anticipates working with Manuel Ferrara (a real porn star), and the shooting goes well – both Ferrara and the director (Karagulian) are protective and encouraging. She even stays afterwards for a friendly chat with Ferrara and Asa Akira (another real porn star), who are both warm and lively. The director’s amiability is extended to the fans who show up at the showroom seeking autographs from the starlets. They seem to be people who have somehow found solace in pornography. Baker (whose Letterboxd film reviews recommend him as a connoisseur of trash cinema) captures this demi-monde (which he revisits in Red Rocket, 2021) with a relaxed familiarity that de-sensationalizes it. (Radium Cheung signed the cinematography, while Baker edited the film, and his former Take Out co-director Shih-Ching Tsou did the costumes.) After giving visibility to invisible people, Starlet marks another crucial point on Baker’s agenda: depicting sex work in a way that destigmatizes it.

This endeavour continues brilliantly in Tangerine. We’re still in L.A., but in a grittier world than that of Starlet: the L.A. of people on the streets, even though it’s a city of cars. That’s what Sin-Dee Rella (Kitana Kiki Rodriguez) and her friend Alexandra (Mya Taylor) do, they work the streets. They are two Black transgender women working in a completely unglamorous world of malls, parking lots, laundromats, warehouses, pawn shops, ethnic restaurants, and doughnut shops.

Tangerine is shot on an iPhone (by the director and Radium Cheung) and brings a fresh visual energy to Baker’s filmography. It has an original look, far from a standard miserable aesthetic – it’s a counter-fairytale. Sin-Dee Rella = Cinderella, with the action taking place on Christmas Eve. The plot is a farce: just out of jail, Sin-Dee learns that her pimp (James Ransome) has taken on a new favourite, who (adding insult to injury) is a skinny, cisgender blonde (Mickey O’Hagan). So, she sets off to confront the traitor and the usurper. Her path crosses that of an Armenian taxi driver, a family man (Karagulian), with a secret passion for trans sex workers. In the end, just like in a farce, all the characters (including the taxi driver’s wife and mother-in-law) gather on stage (in a doughnut shop) to settle their scores. Sparks fly in all directions (not even Alexandra, who turns out to be a treacherous friend, is spared), but there’s something festive about the reunion (especially for Baker’s fans, who by now are familiar with his ensemble cast: Ransome – the Eminem-like pimp in trouble; Karagulian – the disgruntled Armenian immigrant, who keeps whining about someone throwing up in his car). For Sin-Dee (but not for her blonde rival), things end on the bright side, as she and Alexandra have at least managed to save their friendship by the end of the day. (Tangerine, like Starlet, is ultimately about friendship.)

Baker doesn’t sugarcoat the sordid and dangerous aspects of the two friends’ lives: at one point, some strangers in a car throw urine in Sin-Dee’s face. But Baker avoids a miserabilist victim narrative; his heroines are too feisty for that, too full of life, sass, and diva attitudes. Instead, he celebrates (along with co-writer Chris Bergoch, with whom he also wrote Starlet and would go on to work on The Florida Project and Red Rocket) their vitality, energy, and appetites (without making solemn statements about “resilience”). Baker’s interest in vices, kinks, dirty jokes, and vulgarity is entirely non-moralizing.

A Heartbreaker of Chaplin and De Sica’s Calibre

Nothing in contemporary cinema moves me to tears as unfailingly as the moment in The Florida Project (a film I’ve seen three times) when the six-year-old girl (Brooklynn Kimberly Prince) realises she’s about to be taken away from her mother. Until that point, the girl has always been cheerful. With her boundless energy, she is Baker’s special effect – constantly doing something to catch your eye – and I almost resent the director for the sharpshooter precision (even “unscrupulous”, I’m tempted to say) with which he weaponizes her in the film’s climax to ensure maximum emotional impact. But De Sica and Chaplin, not to mention Disney, could be just as unscrupulous in their recourse to children and puppies, and with The Florida Project, Baker establishes himself as a heartbreaker of their calibre.

In fact, Disney’s shadow looms over the entire film. The motel where the mother and daughter live (for $38 a night) is right at the entrance to Disney’s Magic Kingdom (in Florida). Some of the residents work in the park’s service industry, while others have simply ended up there. Called “Magic Castle”, painted aquamarine and pink, the motel is a ready-made metaphor: a shelter for precarious workers, even for the utterly destitute, right on the edge of the Magic Kingdom. The motel stands in a dystopian neoliberal landscape – next to swamps beyond which lies a similar, but abandoned complex (the one the girl sets on fire, to the wild delight of the entire community). An old paedophile loiters around the playground, a highway passes nearby, helicopters fly overhead, and a company proudly advertises “Machine Gun America”, as if it were a rival fairyland to the Magic Kingdom. Simply put, it’s a slice of modern-day American desolation. But the ugliness isn’t straightforward. In strictly aesthetic terms, there’s also a form of American fabulousness here; we’re talking about places contaminated by the fluorescent unreality of the dreams they sell.

In his interviews, Baker is careful to avoid the rhetoric of activism, yet The Florida Project struck me from the very first viewing – and still does– as a condemnation of the inhumanity of late capitalism. So, I was initially surprised to discover that many viewers see it as a film about individual responsibility, concluding that the protagonist fully deserves to have her daughter taken away. (There are endless discussions about this online.) I was also surprised to learn that Baker welcomes these contradictory interpretations – blame capitalism versus it’s a matter of individual responsibility. But revisiting his gallery of desperate improvisers digging themselves deeper and deeper under our horrified gaze, I realised that these characters (akin to those in the Safdie brothers’ films like Good Time or Uncut Gems, and likely descended from the characters played by Al Pacino and John Cazale in Sidney Lumet’s New York classic Dog Day Afternoon) owe part of their vitality and depth precisely to the fact that it’s not always easy to determine how much they are socio-economically conditioned and how much they are acting independently.

Among the post-war Italian neorealists, De Sica and Fellini also avoid fully articulating their humanism in the form of anti-capitalist protest, though, as Bazin observed about Bicycle Thieves, the protest emerges anyway – from the intense, affectionate attention they give to people who are largely deprived of such regard by the social order. Other Italian neorealists were different – Visconti embraced communism, while Rossellini followed his Catholicism – but Baker’s main models in that area remain De Sica and Fellini. Bicycle Thieves (with its hero, a poster-sticker depicting Hollywood stars like Rita Hayworth) was clearly a model for Take Out and, more loosely, for The Florida Project (weaponizing the child and juxtaposing the characters’ living conditions with an industry that produces glamorous escapism). Anora (2024), by contrast, has as its guiding spirit the classic-neorealist Fellini of Nights of Cabiria (1957) – the empathetic chronicler of a prostitute’s dreams and aspirations.

In Anora, Baker returns to New York (after Los Angeles and Florida, with a detour to Texas City for Red Rocket), but also to the Cinderella archetype (invoked in Tangerine as well). The heroine (Mikey Madison) is a stripper from Brighton Beach – “Little Russia” in Brooklyn; the granddaughter of an Uzbek immigrant, she speaks a little Russian. Anora likes her work, and her positive energy is appreciated by her clients. She seems to sleep with them only when she wants to. One she does want to sleep with happens to be the son of a Russian oligarch, sent by his parents to study in the States. It’s no wonder she’s interested in him – aside from the massive luxury he lives in (which Anora certainly takes into account), the boy (Mark Eydelshteyn) behaves like an enthusiastic puppy, keeping her in fits of bliss from morning till night. Especially at night, when he goes out partying, taking her along. The first half-hour of Anora is a whirlwind of parties – with noise, dancing, drugs, and impulsive trips to Las Vegas – staged by Baker with his usual non-moralizing eye. Sure, the boy’s life is pure madness, but at first glance it seems non-toxic, even charming. When he proposes, Anora accepts. She moves into his mansion, where they start playing house. Naturally, the fairytale is bound to get derailed.

One day, someone knocks on the door, and with an erection in his boxers (since the gods of art-house cinema come in various forms, and Baker – blessed be his name – is one who wouldn’t refuse such a gag), the prince goes to open it. A minute later, the prince has bolted, leaving Cinderella to fend off the three goons sent by his parents to annul the marriage. The fight drags on, turning into an unforgettable cinema moment, a mini-masterpiece of slapstick. What keeps it enjoyable is that the three goons are hesitant, unsure of what they’re supposed to do (Anora, after all, is technically the lady of the house, the prince’s wife), while she fights with everything she has – headbutts, biting, scratching, whatever it takes. At the same time, it’s an uncomfortable show, treading a fine line: three men going after a woman – who also screams at the top of her lungs (including, “Help! They’re raping me!”). A progressive audience, like the art-house crowd, might feel uneasy, uncertain whether it’s appropriate to laugh, while Baker, having embraced the farcical tone, weaves in gleefully vulgar quid pro quos – a goon stepping out of the room momentarily, only to return and find his comrade tangled up with the girl in what looks like a compromising position.

What has changed since Tangerine – which itself evoked both farce and fairy tale – is that Baker now works with relatively large budgets, on film (16mm in Red Rocket, 35mm here), with dialogue that’s more scripted than improvised, and gags that are effectively calibrated right from the script stage. Baker has stayed loyal to his troupe (one of the goons in Anora is played by the great Karren Karagulian – the eternal Armenian chasing the American Dream), but some of the actors he now casts are not exactly nobodies. In 2019, Mikey Madison stood out as one of Manson’s hippies in Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in… Hollywood. So, before fighting with Karagulian’s goons, she had a can of dog food thrown at her head by Brad Pitt and was burned with a flamethrower by Leonardo DiCaprio. The Florida Project also features Willem Dafoe, a bona fide Hollywood star, the first in Baker’s cinema (if we don’t count Asa Akira and Manuel Ferrara). He plays the motel manager – a competent man, deeply compassionate and tactful, but ultimately powerless. It’s my favourite role of Dafoe’s – nowhere else does he move me as he does there.

But for some of Baker’s fans, something has been lost: the raw, straight-out-of-life feel of a film like Take Out is no longer there. A well-crafted script like Anora’s, rooted in farce, uses familiar tropes and stereotypical Russian figures, even if handled deftly, and the documentary texture – the glimpses into Brighton Beach’s pool halls, lap-dance clubs, or video arcades, not to mention the opulent American palaces of Russian oligarchs (which here provide a certain fabulous, somewhat magical, yet not-quite-realistic American realism) – might seem a bit touristy or superficial compared to his earlier films. To such objections, loyal Baker fans like myself (I truly can’t imagine a Baker film I wouldn’t like) respond by pointing to the increasingly complex, difficult modulations he orchestrates.

Anora is a fairy tale that eventually shatters and then revives, but with a different prince – one of the goons (beautifully played by Yura Borisov), who gradually reveals a chivalrous and gallant soul: a dramatic evolution that’s hard to handle without losing the audience along the way. It culminates in a long take where Anora shifts from the impulse to hump this second prince to the urge to punch him, ultimately ending up crying in his arms as an apocalyptic snowfall seems to bury the car they’re sitting in. The emotional experience offered to the viewer in these final minutes is so ambiguous, so disconcerting, so full of ups and downs, so dizzying, so easy to dismiss, and so difficult to orchestrate smoothly (in terms of transitions between emotional states) that it’s as if Baker is trying, right before our eyes, to reach a level of cinematic grace he’s never approached before.

Andrei Gorzo

Film critic (b. 1978). He is a university lecturer at UNATC, where he has been teaching since 2004. His favorite movie is The Third Man (1949). Writes on andreigorzoblog.wordpress.com.