A sex worker's dizzying journey

   

 I’ve been reading about Anora ever since the movie won the Palm d'Or at this year’s Cannes Film Festival and began catapulting its way around the festival circuit. My initial anticipation was sparked not only by an award but by the movie’s pedigree. Anora is the work of Sean Baker,  a director whose The Florida Project I admired for its specificity and down-to-earth credibility. 

  Baker’s interests tend to be married to narrow forms of realism that resonate beyond each movie’s carefully chosen setting. His movies are about specific places -- Los Angeles in Tangerine -- but they're also about characters who struggle with chaotic forms of living -- the transgender sex worker in the same movie.

     In Anora, Baker immerses himself in Brighton Beach, a Brooklyn enclave defined by its community of Russian emigres and business people. If that description makes it sound as if Baker plans to chart an inspirational course through immigration issues,  think again.

    Baker builds his movie around an American-born woman who works in a nightclub that specializes in lap dances, some held in private VIP rooms.

    In what rightly has been described as a breakthrough performance, Mikey Madison plays Anora, a woman who’d like to escape the sex-worker grind. Ambition aside, Anora does her job with convincing enthusiasm. She’s not embarrassed by her work and has learned how to sell herself.

     The story’s pivotal event occurs when Anora meets Ivan (Mark Eydelshteyn), a 21-year-old Russian club patron who’s goofy and  immature. As it turns out, Ivan is also the son of a powerful Russian oligarch. Happy to pay for sex, he’s so taken with Anora — who calls herself Ani — that he offers to pay her $15,000 to spend a week him. They’ll party, take drugs, have sex, and party some more.

      Ably created by Eydelshteyn as a kid who's nothing but loose ends, Ivan lives in a beautifully appointed modern home in a gated community. His ocean view offers a stark contrast to Ani’s apartment. She and her sister share a dingy flat next to subway tracks where trains rumble their insult past smudged windows. Ani needs the money, does her sex duties willingly, and enjoys her new exposure to the high life. 

      Early on, the movie feels like a giddy party that includes a major bash at Ivan’s home, trips to upscale clubs, romps on the beaches of Coney Island, and a stay at a luxurious Las Vegas hotel where Ivan is a regular customer. The characters take a deep dive into what seems to be an inexhaustible supply of drugs. 

       We're not sure what to make of it when Ivan proposes and the couple hurries through a Las Vegas wedding. Suddenly, Ani is living the dream, much to the envy of at least one of her former co-workers.

       We wait for the fall of the other shoe, the hard kick that will shatter Ani’s dreams, but Baker is too shrewd to crash the gates of formula. Instead, he turns Anora into a near-hysterical comedy, bringing a farcical tone to the increasingly wild proceedings.

     A time bomb ticks beneath the story’s surface. Ivan’s disapproving parents are about to arrive in New York to nullify their notoriously irresponsible son's marriage.  

     Enter a cohort of subservient family employees who, with Ani in tow, must locate the fleeing Ivan. He runs off without Ani at the suggestion that he’s about to be transported back to Russia. Sans Ivan, there can be no annulment.

       Included in this gaggle are an Armenian (Karen Karagulian) who works as the loyal family fixer and two henchmen (Vache Tovmasyan and Yura Borisov).  Hired as the muscle of the group, Borisov's Igor has a disarming soulful quality that throws us off guard.

       The Brighton bumblers fail to take Ani’s toughness into account. A scene in Ivan’s apartment turns into an explosive comic brawl in which Ani holds her own. Baker allows the scene to play out as the mayhem spirals out of control. 

        Eventually, Ivan’s father (Aleksey Serebryakov) and mother (Daryl Ekamasova) arrive in New York to retrieve their wayward son. Ivan's no-nonsense, steely mom makes no bones about asserting her authority. Ani isn't impressed. 

       Madison handles her role with bold confidence. She ignites sparks of humanity that keep Ani from becoming a caricature, and Baker continues his exploration of boisterous nihilistic situations that resist easy compartmentalization.

       Anora brings us into a tipsy, fascinating, ethnically specific world where Brooklyn funk and obscene amounts of money create an intoxicating mix that can be funny, bitter, and impressively true to itself. 

     

A fading porn star returns to Texas

     Director Sean Baker has made movies that explore parts of American life Hollywood usually neglects. 

    Tangerine, a 2015 movie shot entirely on iPhones, dealt with transgender life on the fringes of Los Angeles. The Florida Project (2017) followed a six-year-old girl who lived in a motel with her mother and, at least for me, represents the film in which Baker’s interests and his aesthetic approach were most successfully blended.

   In Red Rocket, Baker tells the story of a fading porn star (Simon Rex) who returns to his hometown on Texas’s Gulf Coast. Desperate and broke, Rex’s Mikey gloms onto his estranged wife and former co-star (Bree Elrod) and her flinty mother (Brenda Deiss).

   Mikey isn’t about to abandon his dreams. He believes he can re-lignite his award-winning porn career by moving behind the camera. He has confidence in his eye for talent. And why not? Wasn’t he the winner of an industry award in the oral sex category? He sees himself as a star-maker.

    Mikey tries to build up a stake by selling pot for a woman (Judy Hill), who lives with her son (Marlon Lambert) and her tough associate (Brittany Rodriguez), a young woman whose face seems never to have been bothered by a smile.

    He also befriends a neighbor (Ethan Darbone) who idolizes him.

    Baker spends screen-time capital establishing the milieu in which Mikey finds himself, along with characters mostly played by non-professionals. He makes frequent stops at the Donut Hole, a shop where he first meets a 17-year-old worker he calls “Strawberry” (Suzanna Son). 

    Mikey immediately senses Strawberry’s porn star potential and courts her with his charm, dubious offers to help with her SATs, and lots of sex, amplified by one of Rex’s major assets. You can guess which.

    Much of the story is played for humor. Sans car and funds, Rex must ride around Texas City on a bicycle. His massive self-delusion is fueled by irrepressible energy that he channels into non-stop verbal barrages.

   An editor once told me on a particularly rumpled day that I looked like I was running even when I was standing still. The same goes for Rex, who moves through his days with Road Runner speed, often spewing his own hype. 

    Bake makes no judgments about Mikey’s career and Strawberry is no naive innocent. We know that Mikey has no qualms about ruining her life but she’s fired by some of the same desire to escape the stultifications of small-town life that drove him. She's sexually eager.

   And despite all his maneuvering, Mikey seldom seems entirely contemptible. He’s still got his youthful zeal.

   So what does Baker do with all of this? That’s the film’s problem. Despite its humor and observational ease when it comes to its characters and their location, the movie must at some point find a way to wrap things up. About three quarters of the way through Red Rocket’s  two-hours and eight minutes, the movie begins to feel long.

    No fair telling more about what happens in the final going. but the movie wraps things up in ways that feel abrupt. Still, Baker makes good use of Rex’s ability to spin his way into a role that spills chaos all over the screen.

A heartbreaking ode to childhood

I can't think of a movie that better captures the evanescent joy and freedom of childhood than The Florida Project, a movie set in a run-down motel in Orland, Fla., the kind of place where residents always are one small step away from homelessness. Joy and freedom, yes, but no matter how much fun these kids have, we know they're hanging on by a thread.

Not coincidentally, the movie takes place near Disney World, an attraction dedicated to an entirely different view of childhood and family than the one the movie so keenly observes. Also not coincidentally -- but definitely ironically -- the motel in which much of the story takes place is called The Magic Castle. Nothing about The Magic Castle, a dump coated with purple paint, seems either magical or noble.

If you're interested in knowing how certain effects in movies are achieved, a bit of on-line research usually can lead you to answers. But I don't know if it's possible to explain how director Sean Baker (Tangerine) obtained the performances that make The Florida Project so convincing and special, particularly from the kids who populate his movie.

Six-year-old Moonee, rendered in an irrepressibly energetic performance by Brooklynn Prince, provides the movie with its centerpiece. Moonee seems to be enjoying a summer away from school with two friends: Scooty (Christopher Rivera) and Jancey (Valeria Cotto). Cotta's Jancey lives with her grandmother in the nearby and equally bereft Futureland Inn.

These are not kids who are sent to summer camps, chauffeured from one enriching activity to another or otherwise sheltered from the harsh realities of a junk-food life in a place where most of the residents have little chance for brighter futures.

It's not surprising that at one point, the kids badly damage an abandoned property or that each of them becomes vulnerable to dangers that Baker doesn't always follow to the most harrowing extremes. What would be the point? Things are bad enough for these kids without piling on.

Moonee lives with her mother (a terrific Bria Vinaite), a young woman who tries to cobble together a life. Vinaite's Halley perpetually runs out of money and we fear that she'll never get a grip on how to be a responsible adult, much less a mother. But -- and here's where the movie shines -- it's equally clear that no matter how unprepared for motherhood Halley is at 22, she loves Moonee. She can be a playmate and a friend to her daughter, but she can't be the adult in the room, probably because in one way or another her early life mirrored Moonee's.

A world-weary custodian named Bobby (an excellent Willem Dafoe) presides over the motel. Bobby collects rent, enforces rules and tries to maintain a semblance of order. Dafoe portrays a sympathetic man who has seen almost every manner of hardship befall the denizens of this shabby world, often more than once. When he tries to help, he knows that he's bucking a tide of bad luck and despair.

The achievement of cinematographer Alexis Zabe must be acknowledged; his images can be lustrous and beautiful without shortchanging the seedy environment in which Moonee and Halley spend their time, occasionally trying to get a taste of the good life. When Moonee has a chance her to eat a real meal, her face practically erupts with delight.

Sometimes, there's less need to rattle on about exceptional movies than when we deal those that are mediocre. That may be the case with The Florida Project, a movie that concludes with a scene catapults Moonee into a world of promise and fantasy.

I won't say anything more about the movie's final shot, but everything that precedes it tells us that Baker knows better. Rude awakenings loom in Moonee's world of dreams. And that's what accounts for the sadness beneath every moment of euphoria in The Florida Project: Fantasies may buoy our spirits, but they also can curdle into the most devastating of lies.

Peeling off LA's facade

Tangerine: a sometimes comic foray into the world of two transgender hookers.

Technical matters usually play second fiddle to story and character when it comes to movie reviewing. But, for me, one of the important reasons to see Tangerine -- a movie about transgender prostitutes scuffling to survive on the mean streets of Los Angeles -- centers on how the movie was made.

Reportedly named for the orange hues that dominate its images, Tangerine was shot entirely on iPhones (with special add-on lenses) and, one presumes, pro-level sound equipment, as well as lots of post-production massaging.

Tricks aside, any feature film shot entirely with iPhones -- specifically the 5s model -- should be of interest to anyone who cares about making credible, big-screen features on the cheap.

I wouldn't say Tangerine is a game changer; it's a continuation of game in which technological innovation already has made it possible for serious filmmakers to operate with budgets that once would have been considered laughable.

The iPhone approach is not incidental to the movie's style: Deeply saturated colors correspond to the street-saturated lives of the movie's characters, two transgender hookers (Kitana Kiki Rodriguez and May Taylor).

Director Sean Baker takes a walk on Los Angeles' seedy side. Neither a moralist nor a journalist, Baker uses a down-scale milieu as a base for a comic exploration of people on the fringe -- "people'' being the operative word.

After spending 28 days in jail, Rodriguez's Sin-Dee Rella is back on the streets. Taylor portrays her best friend Alexandra, another hooker -- albeit one who's less prone to emotional fireworks.

When Alexandra tells Sin-Dee that her pimp boyfriend (James Ransone) has been sleeping with a woman (Mickey O'Hagan), Sin-Dee's fury is unleashed.

A whisper of a plot serves as an excuse to create a variety of scenes that introduce a variety of oddball characters, notably Razmik (Karren Karagulian), a stony-faced Armenian cab driver who routinely betrays his family with dalliances with transgender hookers. He's the kind of guy who's offended if he encounters a hooker with a vagina.

The main characters are played by trans actress, who bring an aura of gritty (and often funny) realism to the story, which -- by the way -- takes place on Christmas Eve, an inescapable note of irony in a film that's far removed from the wreath-and-holy mode.

Just when you find yourself wondering where the hell the film is going, Baker stages a farcical scene in a joint called Donut Time. Baker brings his characters together for a raucous comic finale.

To enjoy Tangerine, you have to accept the movie's profanity and sometimes squalid locations. Baker depicts this world with nonjudgmental realism, which means that Tangerine isn't always a pleasant experience.

Baker caps the movie with a coda about the way friendships survive and endure. I wouldn't say that Tangerine rises to the level of a feel-good movie, but it's a lively, full-on immersion in the tattered lives of characters who seldom (if ever) make it to the screen.

And, yes, it also proves that if you know what you're doing, you may not need a small fortune to make a good movie.