The exuberant star-making performance of Mikey Madison (Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Scream) in the title role of Sean Baker’s new film, Anora, is getting a lot of attention, as it should. But all the characters and performances are so vivid and lively, they make the whole movie an exhilarating experience.
Writer-director Baker’s longtime commitment to independent filmmaking, evident in all his films including the most recent, Tangerine (2015) and The Florida Project (2017), results in class-conscious movies focused on the lives of marginalized characters. They’re mostly working-class people struggling to realize some version of the American dream, though they’re coming at it from disadvantaged starting points.
I almost teared up writing that, it’s so rare and valuable a commitment.
Baker is someone who knows what social realism is and can use it in a sentence in interviews and discuss how he’s drawing upon that movement in his own filmmaking, often in combination with Hollywood film influences he also loves. Even better, he knows he doesn’t want to represent the lives of hard-pressed people drably:
I know if I had somebody make a film about my life, I wouldn’t want it to look just gray and drab. Even when I’m going through hard times, I still see color, I still see beauty. And I think that we tried to reflect that in the style of the film. We find the color out there.
On the other hand, respecting the harshness of working-class realities in America, Baker doesn’t deal in facile happy endings. The exhilaration of watching his films is bound up in his insightful and compassionate view of his struggling characters’ lives, which includes a clear-eyed look at the lack of bright, life-transforming opportunities available to them. Living to fight another day with spirited defiance is triumph enough in Baker’s movies.
And he’s successful enough now with Anora, which won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival —…
Auteur: Eileen Jones
