Sean Baker has become an expert at locating his movies. Locality personalizes a movie, sets it somewhere that feels like a place, projects the dimensions of the setting to the audience, saying places matter and are characters too. The American spaces Sean Baker’s cinema inhabits are specific, sensory, use color precisely, and are worlds unto themselves. We feel like we have visited a place after we have seen a Sean Baker movie — as he captures the soul and interiority of America, one moving picture at a time.
This is a filmography about sex work in America, formally beginning with 2012’s Starlet, which is shot on an entry-level digital camera from Sony. The type you would record homemade, not explicitly professional, porn videos on. Blending this stylistic choice with the sun-bleached San Fernando Valley, Starlet feels like a character drama shot in pornographic terms, and it’s a stunning result.
Shot on smartphones — 3 iPhone 5s devices with lenses, apps, and editing programs — Tangerine (2015) still deftly captures the vibrant temperature of life in Los Angeles, following a transgender prostitute during a day of their life on the streets. Because Baker cast non-actors, they were able to convey naturalistic performances, as they already knew what it meant to be filmed by phones.
We get Baker’s most radical and heightened experiment with place in The Florida Project (2016), which finds young girls living right outside the gates of “The Most Magical Place on Earth,” Kissimmee, Florida… Or, Disney World. The film uses 35mm to convey the magical cinema dreams of these children, living in this bright-colored hovel set against vibrant tourist industries. But then Baker pulls out a trick, switching to his iPhone 6s, as the girls run to the theme park, which feels both renegade and guerrilla as an act of filmmaking, but also breaks the 35mm illusion, contrasting stark reality and understood camera contexts, as the girls transfer through the liminal theme park space.
To capture the wider expanses of Texas City, Texas, Red Rocket was shot on Sean Baker’s own Arriflex 16mm camera, with anamorphic lenses that broadened the image. To shoot on film is a creative restraint and a solution. The reason why to use 16mm is they could not afford 35mm and the result is a film that feels deeply personal. Likewise, Baker cast the film with economy, hiring the lead actor from his Vine page, street-casting parts, and even having crew members step into roles. It begins to feel like every step of a Sean Baker production embodies the inner-workings of the character stories he wants to tell, starting with the spaces, and expanding into how the world relates to their existence in that space.
And now Sean Baker is breaking through. The personal indie projects have paid off and caught the attention of the right people. He is a notable director and arrives with a fully-formed filmography of spaces and places. Which brings us to the stunning Coney Island of Anora.
We move between gentleman’s clubs, elaborately rich housing overlooking Brooklyn’s Riviera, Russian-American segments of the boardwalk, and then in contrast, the faux glitz and glam of high-end accommodations in Las Vegas, and then right back to New York, more grounded and inhibited, more real and substantial, formally still a dream space for immigrant stories, but one cast against hard realities.
Within these spaces Sean Baker exudes character through the texture of the place. It’s more than the right actors with the right accents, it’s their peculiarities, their affectations, which switch between Russian and New York’s nasally aws, dropped vowels, and borough-specific inflections. That’s all there too, it has to be, because the place Baker filmed alongside director of photography Drew Daniels (returning from Red Rocket), is distinctive and full of stark contrasts.
By the end of the picture, New York’s coldness pervades The Russian Quarter and the hearts of the characters inside it. They have been through it, this whole farce of marriage and relationships as a young playboy’s play things, just like his videogames, and his purview on life, deeply unserious. But then we have Anora, played by Mikey Madison who is due a lot of awards, who has to live a separate New York reality, rendered in harsh relief by the ending.
Along the way there, a well-cast group of characters inform a certain subset of New York character study. We can read them as literary characters. They each have interiority and purpose within their spaces, they matter to the movie but also to the frame, they belong where they exist, or the way they do not belong to it is the point.
Everything Sean Baker does with the movie is intentional. It’s drawn out into a spectacle, a week-long marriage affair that moves between spaces that tell us everything about the people within them. Along the way, we get closer to two of these characters — the eponymous Anora and bodyguard Igor (Yora Borisov) — as they try to track down Ivan (Mark Eydelshteyn) so they can annul their marriage, at the request of family back in Russia, who are footing the bill for his whole lifestyle, and relationship.
The way we search through Coney Island’s boardwalks and specialty shops, is the journey and the destination. We are led by family confidant Toros (Karren Karagulian), who must reunite the couple so he can sever their marriage. Some of the most gorgeous scenes are shot cold, and long over the boardwalk, the faded-saturated blue hanging over the facades of the shops, and the weather cutting to the bone. It exudes this specificity of place that belongs to an entire community but cinematically only to this one movie. It is deeply unique and evokes strong feelings through color, motif, and the mode of spatial storytelling.
Sean Baker has created another space unlike any other. It’s so specific as to be universally accepted as the totality of this lived-in concept of place. We can assign Anora as belonging to this segment of New York, just as this subculture belongs wholly to the movie, as they are so rightly captured. It’s a tone-perfect exploration of immigrant class systems, dense city structures formed around transplanted communities, and is so firmly New York in its attitude, that you have to respect the form of it all. Sean Baker’s cracked fairytale is the soul of Coney Island’s Russian community, and it’s an extraordinary achievement in filmmaking.