Sean Baker's new film Anora had just won the Palme d'Or prize at Cannes. It is a surprising hit in many viewers' eyes, but the quality of Baker's films is actually unsurprisingly high, if you have a considerable knowledge of his filmography.
In my opinion, Sean Baker is probably the best mid-career American director working today, because through each of his films, you see an America that you have never seen before.
Sean Baker's Mesmerizing Universe of Outcasts
Baker's films have always focused on marginalized communities that have been ignored by the mainstream world. In his early films Take Out and The Prince of Broadway, he turned his eyes, respectively, to Chinese immigrants working in New York restaurants, and illegal African immigrants selling fake shoes and bags in the Broadway area. Following these films are two of his breakthrough works, Tangerine and The Florida Project. In these films, he expanded his vision to a wider peripheral world outside of New York: transgender sex workers in Los Angeles' red-light district, and poorly parented children living in a low-cost housing project which is practically next door to Disneyland.
The subjects of Baker's films are very much what you'd expect to see on TV news, and the marginal nature of the characters and their circumstances in these films inevitably makes telling their stories, intentionally or not, a curiosity.
But what's remarkable about Baker as a director and a writer is, he never treats his subjects in an exploitative or consumptive manner. He adopts a level gaze, a well-intentioned search for understanding, and a kind of empathy for every character that appears in his films, but at the same time, he never abandons his simple curiosity about every marginalized world.
And the filming methods of Sean Baker (or the mixture of them) are also highly original. Sean Baker rarely seeks named actors to play his outcast characters. Instead, he likes to cast non-professional actors to tell their own stories. Also, he contrasts the realistic contemporary backgrounds of his stories with highly-saturated images, and intensely dramatic situations. The mixture of these methods is like a Molotov cocktail: colorful, volatile, explosive, and always fun to watch.
It is this whole set of creative approaches that makes Baker's films as compelling as they are warm and moving.
Baker's Most Challenging Film to Date: Red Rocket
But what we want to emphatically look back is his last film before Anora, Red Rocket, which is perhaps the most challenging film to that date. The challenge of this film is directed as much toward the audience as it is toward the filmmaker himself. Because the protagonist of the film is, well, a total scumbag.
Like Baker's previous films, Red Rocket is set in an overlooked corner of the world: Texas City, USA. And the city itself has a complicated history: it benchmarked the beginning of the end of the American Civil War; it was the site of the largest non-nuclear explosion in human history; one of the most horrific serial murders in the United States in the 1970s happened there. Today, Texas City is still the center of America's oil industry, but the city is in a state of severe economic decline.
It was at this time that a wandering kid of this town went back. Why did he do so? Because he was also a poor guy with nowhere else to go.
He is the main character of the story, Mikey (played by the wonderfully seedy Simon Rex), five-time AVN Awards (aka "Oscars of Porn") winner, an AVN Hall of Famer, and also a 40-year-old porn star who had passed his prime. He was once a hugely "gifted" man, but now he's so old and gray that he needs a Viagra boost every time he goes into action. In the raging world of porn, no matter how "talented" he is, he can't escape the fate of being gradually eliminated by newcomers. So he returns home from Hollywood, reunites with the wife that he has abandoned for years, shamelessly lives in her apartment, sells marijuana for his living, and searching for a way to break out the mundane small-town life again.
After a brief hiatus, he finds the perfect opportunity. Chance comes in the form of a sexy young woman named Strawberry. Three weeks shy of 18 years old, Strawberry works in a donut store and is as flirty, romantic and innocent as any Lolita in a straight man's dream. Strawberry's charm rekindles the heart (and the dick) of a middle-aged man. Mikey is so enamored of the young girl that he regains his vigor and doesn't need his Viagra anymore.
But underneath his nervous, almost stupid naivety, there is a vicious side to Mikey's character. He is a self-serving parasite, those who lack judgment and experience will be captured by his sweet words, and those who put their trust in him will end up being used by him. He regains his wife's trust by selling his sex, but his real purpose is only to use his family as a buffer; he acquires the admiration of fellow country boy Ronnie with his boasting, but he hangs out with Ronnie only to kill time and satisfy his vanity, so when he harms Ronnie by triggering a series of car accidents, he refuses to take the blame, and is content with letting Ronnie be the scapegoat.
The local godmother figure, Leon, and her daughter, June, who commissioned Mikey to distribute marijuana, know his character inside and out. They work with him for profit, but always keep him at arm's length because they know Mikey is a disaster to everyone he touches.
But Strawberry, who is eager to escape from Texas, knows nothing of Mikey's schemes. Throughout his life, Mikey has made his living via women, and Strawberry is no exception. Mikey sees her as a stepping stone to getting back into the adult movie business. He tries to lure her into agreeing to star in adult films, so he could profit from her work as her agent, aka a pimp. Strawberry is just the latest in a long line of Mikey's victims.
Where this story ends up will have to be explored by those who are interested in this film. But we can be sure of one thing here: Mikey's sordid dreams didn't come true.
But the funny thing is, when the dust settles on the story, we even feel a twinge of sadness for Mikey, even as we loathe his character, and even as we see the numerous damages he's done to other people. But it's still saddening to see someone with such a zest for life, such a sense of conviction in his dreams, and such a sense of action, end up with nothing in return.
Is it morally wrong to view Red Rocket this way? Perhaps there are no easy answers to this question, as Sean Baker himself has had his share of doubts. He had spent time with many adult film actors similar to Mikey, and he also had been so mesmerized by their charms that he had been unable to recognize these people for what they are: insidious manipulators. So the film Red Rocket is not only telling a story, but is also telling of a particular kind of relationship: the one that exists between the apparently naive manipulator and the manipulated; the one that exists between the charming deceiver and the deceived.
At the same time, Red Rocket is a satire piece, a fable with some deeper meaning hidden under the surface, and a brilliant black comedy. Even the title of the movie is a joke that accurately describes Mikey's character: you can Google the meaning of the slang term “Red Rocket” if you like.
Finally, Red Rocket is a sociological study of Texas City. The social ecology of the downtrodden industrial area, the values, mentalities and lifestyles of its diverse residents are brought to life by Baker's precise insights and the performances of several local non-professional actors. Like Tangerine and The Florida Project, the experience of watching Red Rocket is like spending two hours of your life in a colorful American community with a group of people you may never get to meet. In an era ruled by entertainment products which knows exactly what you want from them, each Baker film is a fearless adventure, a monumental achievement, and a viewing experience that is both challenging and unsettling, but always rewarding in the end.
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