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Oct 18, 2024

The Naked Humanity of Sean Baker | Vanity Fair

What is the right kind of sensitivity? Is there a truer, better form of compassion? Those are questions I often have after seeing a movie by Sean Baker , a filmmaker who affectionately and bluntly

What is the right kind of sensitivity? Is there a truer, better form of compassion? Those are questions I often have after seeing a movie by Sean Baker, a filmmaker who affectionately and bluntly probes into the lives of a sort of invisible American under-class. His films, including the Palme d’Or winning Anora (opening in US theaters on October 18), force us to confront our politically correct values, to investigate the line between decency and exploitation.

Baker has made four films about sex work, traversing between porn, prostitution, and exotic dancing. He has also made films about those living on the dire economic fringes, hustlers and hangers-on feverishly treading water. While early works like 2004’s Take Out and 2008’s Prince of Broadway deal strictly with the immigrant experience in New York City, his later films bring sex into the economic picture, laying bare the precarious realities and wild hopes of people so often dismissed, discounted, and denigrated for their profession.

It’s noble sociological work, in some ways. But watching Baker’s films, one also may question whether he—a cis, white, straight, prep-school educated filmmaker—is the best steward of stories like Tangerine (2015), a dash through the night following two trans sex workers of color as they scramble to keep afloat in Los Angeles. And what of 2012’s Starlet, a mostly prickly-sweet story of a young woman befriending an elderly widow that takes a graphic detour into pornography? What is it that drives Baker toward this subject matter so far outside his own experience? Is it prurience, or altruistic fascination?

Maybe it’s both. And maybe the above questions become pedantic and fussy in the light of the films themselves. While revisiting some of his work in the lead-up to Anora’s release, I was surprised to be reminded of the softness and care of Baker’s gaze, his gentle but persuasive insistence on the humanity of those so routinely dehumanized. Of them, only the grim groomer fable Red Rocket (2021), so propulsively led by a charming then menacing Simon Rex, is a study in cynicism, in nearly unmitigated darkness. Otherwise, Baker seems to understand both the nosy curiosity that compels people toward his films and their roles as potential tools of empathy.

Tangerine, starring previously untested actors Kitana Kiki Rodriguez and Mya Taylor, is a rollicking, precarious riot, made with Baker’s signature controlled verve. It is also a strikingly poignant film, gracefully allowing a quotidian plainess to complicate its portrait of lives lived outside the mainstream. It ends in a humble laundromat, while one working girl waits for her clothes to be cleaned and her friend and colleague extends her the simplest kind of comfort.

Baker has said in interviews that this is a core interest of his: showing sex workers in the so-called “real world,” properly contextualizing them as not so different from anyone else. Baker was inspired to make Starlet by conversations he had with porn actors while working on a television show early in his career, in which he realized how, well, regular many people in that industry are, despite the often irregular or predacious conditions of their work. (He also saw something unnerving in many of the men in that field, which inspired Red Rocket.)

Starlet is an arresting statement of intent in that regard, functioning mostly as a low-to-the-ground version of a familiar heartwarming story. Dree Hemingway plays a young woman, Jane, living in the San Fernando Valley. By chance, she befriends a lonely old grump played by Besedka Johnson, in her first and last film role. Jane’s life is not blessed, certainly—she has money woes and a shifty pair of roommates—but she has an easygoing resilience. When we do finally see her at work on a porn set—set up as something of a twist in the story—we encounter mostly a professional bonhomie, politenesses and encouragements shared between coworkers. There is graphic (and, I think, simulated) sex, but it is brief and not quite leering. Baker is seeking to demystify rather than titillate.

Of course, not all sex work, in the porn world or beyond, is safe and supportive. Baker is careful to suggest this in Starlet, and certainly in Tangerine—where the two women at the center are at far more immediate risk than Jane of Starlet. It’s that frankness, about good and bad coexisting so closely, that can raise one’s hackles about Baker’s films. In them, is he being flippant and deliberately evasive, or is he showing a more measured, more holistically understood version of reality?

Red Rocket, about a faded porn star who returns home to Florida and sets his eyes on a teenage girl as the protege that will bring him back into the professional fold, almost plays as a response to the qualms about Starlet and Tangerine. Here is the danger and seediness hinted at in Baker’s previous sex work films, albeit housed in a raucous, bright-hued comedy. It’s almost, in its strange fashion, a statement of reassurance from filmmaker to audience: I know the topics I cover are multivarious and often bleak, and here is proof of that sober comprehension.

After Tangerine and before Red Rocket, Baker turned back to the themes of Take Out and Prince of Broadway for The Florida Project (2017), a tender story of a mother and child teetering on the brink of homelessness that arrives at a bittersweet but still damning conclusion. This is a more overtly political film than, say, Starlet, while nonetheless attempting to eschew the didactic moralizing of so many message movies. It is not surprising that The Florida Project was Baker’s most commercially successful film to date (and his first film to receive an Academy Award nomination). It has an appealing gregariousness, and does not court the same taboo as Starlet or Tangerine. The financial conditions portrayed so bluntly in the film should, however, be entirely taboo—wholly intolerable in the richest country in the world.

All the concerns of Baker’s oeuvre seem to coalesce in Anora, a madcamp comedy that grows progressively more grave. The titular character, more commonly known as Ani (Mikey Madison), is the avatar of Baker’s favored subject matter, fierce and funny and dancing as fast as she can. Ani is a stripper at a Manhattan club who is swept off her feet by the money and attention of the son of a Russian oligarch—whisked away into what seems to be a Cinderella romance, before the bitter facts of the world come crashing through the door.

Baker is clearly enamored of Ani’s spiky joie de vivre, her resourcefulness, even her tragically naive belief—despite all that she’s already seen in her young life—that she could be suddenly delivered into the coddling embrace of the American dream. He puts her in great peril, too, though the movie is off-handed about the ways in which Ani is manhandled and threatened, reduced to an object of nuisance by rich people and their male henchmen. It’s only toward the end of the story that Baker lets the direness of what Ani has just experienced settle over the film; this was perhaps not so merry a romp after all.

That jolt of reality is appreciated, but Baker does not allow for the comforting simplicity of a sad, somber ending. There is a ray of hope, emanating strangely from one of the henchmen who had, an hour earlier in the film, roughly restrained and bound Ani while she fought for her dignity, and her freedom. He may actually be a good guy at heart, a gentle giant who genuinely cares for Ani. Or like so many real women in Ani’s line of work, she has once again been placed in the position of warily trusting someone whose outward kindness might mask a desire to control.

Just before the film’s arresting final scene, there is a troubling bit of dialogue in which Ani tells this hulk, Igor (Yura Borisov), that she’s sure he would have raped her had they been alone. This arrives right after some guarded flirtation that happened in the gaps between Ani’s reminders that she has been assaulted. Though Igor dismisses the idea that he is a would-be rapist, something sinister hangs in the air. Maybe this is the manifestation of a constant threat faced by sex workers, a nagging but practical suspicion about what men—be they clients or captors—might be capable of. If Anora is meant to end with the uneasy budding of a new romance, it does so with no small amount of reservations. Igor may play down Ani’s fears, but I’m not entirely sure Baker is doing the same.

What’s most striking about Anora on second viewing is how it evokes the dashed fantasies of so many Americans, their constant striving all done under the faith that some deux ex machina rescue may be just around the corner. Ani is repeatedly called stupid in the film, as if she is some clueless ditz who couldn’t see her circumstances for what they were. But really, she has simply been operating from the same motivation that drives so many people struggling to make ends meet, based on what they’ve been forever reassured of: that luck and timing and hard work will eventually grant access to the nation’s promise.

Often, of course, this isn’t the case. And perhaps that’s why Ani cries in Igor’s car at the end of the film: because she dared to let herself believe that the good could be true, that her ship had come in, that something like love and safety may have presented themselves to her in the most unexpected of ways. Crucially, Anora does not shake its head and suggest that Ani’s stripping and house calls have been a cheap or fruitless path to a better life. It passes judgment not on her work, but on the outcome of so much work in America. The rich may deign to engage from time to time, but they will always return to their rarefied climes, leaving those they’ve used out in the cold.

Sometimes I wonder if my occasional knee-jerk negative response to Baker’s films is a kind of revulsion in the face of reality. Sure, I could wrap criticism up in the language of propriety, debating whether Baker has been exactingly responsible in his depiction of ecosystems that many other filmmakers glamorize, ghettoize, or outright ignore. Those debates are certainly worth having. But sometimes it may be cover for a more visceral, more discomfiting reaction to the core truths that Baker shows us, his insistence that we see his characters in a light that is awfully familiar.

At his best, Baker makes compartmentalization difficult. He opens the gates between classes and customs, pulls back curtains, blurs entrenched ideas of virtuousness and vice. His films—so wild and yet meticulously structured, so vivid with life, oftentimes populated by actors we’ve never seen before—draw us into a world that appears startlingly foreign. And then, as our eyes adjust and prejudices fall away, we realize it’s been our world all along.

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