In our latest critical piece, Thompson Rivers University’s Professor Seán Patrick Donlan weighs in on Oscar’s newest darling, indie filmmaker Sean Baker.
Out here, it is all about our hustle.
Alexandra in Tangerine
Sean Baker’s something of a hustler. Don’t misunderstand me, he’s also a talented writer, director, editor, and cinematographer, with an especially strong visual sense. He’s a strong advocate, too, for independent film-making and independent cinemas. But his picture of poverty is distorted and shallow and his images and interviews are often at odds, particularly around Anora (2024). It can be difficult to know whether we’re to love or laugh at his subjects. And that confusion may be his secret.
Evidence of a hustle was there from the start. Baker’s first film was – wait for it – Four Letter Words (2000). He was writer, director, and editor, and filmed it in his native New Jersey. The film literally begins with a character’s head in a toilet; within a minute, he’s vomiting. Four Letter Words is juvenilia, a cheap flick revolving almost entirely around the one-liners of drunken or stoned young suburban white men. While it occasionally feels depressingly realistic and misogynistic, it largely focuses on sex and porn, with a few ethnic slurs and a long conversation about one character’s fetish for Asian women.
Take Out (2004) and Prince of Broadway (2008), with Baker as director-cinematographer, suggested a very different path, a commitment to cinematic realism and social justice. With longtime partners Shih-Ching Tsou and Darren Dean, Baker developed each film collaboratively, with largely non-professional casts. In both, the male protagonists are struggling immigrants. Take Out may be the director’s most authentic film; it hints, too, at wider systems of oppression. But Prince of Broadway already suggests that Baker’s style is more akin to Cassavetes than neorealism. He encourages audiences to view his work as direct cinema, faithfully in its shaky gaze. But that veracity is equated, here and later, with the endless shouting and pointless argumentation of the lower orders.
With Starlet (2012) and Tangerine (2015), we arrive at what we might cautiously call the mature artist. Baker’s interest has cleared shifted from characters pushed to the periphery, as in Take Out and Prince of Broadway, to individuals choosing work in the sex industry: a porn actress and transgender sex workers respectively. Anora’s Ani is hardly new. But since Baker tells us almost nothing of his characters’ paths to sex work or the abuses common to the trade, we’re left with characters whose obvious flaws appear all their own. Despite his protestations of allyship, each film feels like caste slumming, less like a celebration of difference than its exploitation, a kind of cinematic pimping.
Baker’s The Florida Project (2017), set in a low-rent motel in the shadow of Disney World, was again celebrated for what many believed to be its faithful snapshot of ordinary people and its critique of the American dream. Halley’s a single mother struggling to make ends meet. Because this is Baker, she’s also an unemployed stripper, fired for not having sex with a customer. But it’s unclear why she doesn’t find other work, she’s wildly irresponsible, and she later engages in sex for money (as well as assault). In short, her situation isn’t ordinary and is too easily attributed to her character and choices instead of oppressive structures. If Baker’s convinced anyone that they’re learning about the poor, given the caricature we’re provided, why would they care?
With Red Rocket (2021), Baker finally shed most of the formal elements of film realism, not least by bringing on Drew Daniels as cinematographer. The film’s substance looks familiar: Mickey, a former porn star, returns to his Texas hometown, a flyover Trumpian hellscape. But if he’s occasionally charismatic, he’s also more explicitly amoral than Baker’s earlier leads. He’s a charlatan who sells drugs and sexually grooms a teenager, among other crimes. Red Rocket feels, at last, like a coherent, if imperfect, critique of a country on the make, without the mixed signals of Starlet, Tangerine, and The Florida Project. The film was also explicitly set during the 2016 American elections and was shot during the 2020 elections; the current huckster-in-chief is everywhere.
Love is a hustle.
Anora’s tagline
Anora (2024) is Baker’s most visually arresting film, with acting of an admittedly high standard. But the idea that it represents solidarity with the marginalized is absurd. The film’s characters are thick, and too thinly sketched. Its slapstick logic and comic carnal consumerism are wildly at odds with any sense of social realism. Worse, despite Baker’s incessant talk of representation, his image of sex work remains remarkably superficial. Ani’s simply chosen to be a lap dancer and to sell herself as a side hustle. Insofar as she has dreams, they’re fairytales in which the idiot Ivan, the coked-up dullard who pays her for her companionship and services, is her Prince. Anora is all about Baker’s hustle.
With Anora, the sense that Baker’s acted all along as a ringmaster for middle-class voyeurism is very difficult to shake; we seemed to have moved from the working to the twerking poor. And whatever sympathies Baker might feel for his subjects, however much he ensures the comfort of his actresses in intimate scenes, Anora projects and fosters a distinctly male gaze – objectifying, exploitative, and transactional – little different from the lads of Four Letter Words or strip club patrons. Sex in the film is graphic and glamourized but neither positive nor empowering. The greatest trick the director’s ever pulled is convincing critics and audiences that these issues don’t exist.
Of course, it’s possible to argue that Anora is satire, that all labour is prostitution, that the hope of economic advancement often reflects a tragic false consciousness, or that an American prostituting themselves to Russian oligarchy has explicit, biting political connotations. But this doesn’t square with Baker’s championing of Ani and her co-workers. Instead, Anora’s a tale about an idiot, full of skin and frenzy, signifying nothing. With it, Baker’s finally found a formula with which he can parade broads and circuses while convincing audiences that they’re privileged spectators to how the other half slums and that their shallow ‘You go, girl’ politics is meaningful class critique.
Sean Baker’s very talented. We can expect additional awards ahead. But despite his continuing shtick, his work isn’t particularly authentic. He’s not a particularly sophisticated critic of modern capitalism. The sex workers that dominate his films are outliers among the poor, who are punished with or without individual virtues, by systematic structures of social oppression and marginalization. In the end, Baker’s films say virtually nothing about, or to, the poor. But his success and statuettes may say a lot about the depth, coherence, and poverty of our contemporary cultural politics.
About the author:
Professor Seán Patrick Donlan is a member of the Faculty of Law at Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops, BC, Canada. He previously worked at the University of Limerick (2002-2015) and the University of the South Pacific (Vanuatu and Fiji, 2016-2018). He has also taught in programs in Canada, France, Ireland, Italy, and Malta. He was a guest on the Law on Film podcast, lectured on An Cailín Ciúin in Galway, serve as Chair of his local film society, and currently teaches a course on law and film (originally developed at the University of Limerick).