Sean Baker is one of the filmmakers we’ve been following since Tangerine, one of the first films made with a cell phone that we were given the chance to see, at Deauville to be precise. A filmmaker from the backroom of Los Angeles, who filmed his own neighborhood at the time, he brought a breath of fresh air, notably by taking a look, not at the bangs of America, but at the bangs of Hollywood, the bangs of the American dream; the people behind the scenes, those who live close to the scenery, and whom no one usually wants to look at. This intimate cinema plays with the boundary between documentary and fiction, poking fun at one of the greatest contradictions of American society, its deeply rooted prudishness, which rubs shoulders on a daily basis with the eccentricity of those who refuse to do so, in complete authenticity. Baker‘s aim is not so much to normalize these characters, but rather to make us feel for them, to share their distress as well as their joy. What emerges from Tangerine, as from The Florida Project or Red Rocket, is essentially a great vitality, a way of dealing with life that is not summed up in struggle or permanent illusion, but alternates between hope, dreams and the return of reality. Of Red Rocket, we said: “Red Rocket continues the work of the American director who places his camera on a pornographic actor in decline, who returns to his native Texas to find his wife and his mother-in-law, in order to survive for a while, only to return to the big time. Red Rocket pursues a recurring theme in contemporary films, that of associating the blocked horizon of a territory with the apparent demoralization of society.”
From The Florida Project, we already headlined: Sean Baker continues his watered-down portrait of a contemporary, precarious and vibrant America. For yes, Baker is resolutely in love with color, contrast and glitz, with the American pink rubbing shoulders with noisy neon lights. He’s interested in the precarious not so much as a state of being, but rather as an obligatory passage, full of uncertainties, conducive to projects, hopes and dreams of “getting by”. Baker‘s entire cinema is a call for air.
Anora is no exception to the rule, this time Baker turns his tender eye on a sex worker, setting her up as a modern-day Cinderella. He takes us with her into an apparent fairy tale, which at any moment could turn into a nightmare. He takes us with her into a world that he depicts in a very cartoonish, American way, inviting cliché after cliché, abandoning here his usually well-documented, close-to-reality material. Baker offers us a “total” fiction, a comedy, half romantic, half Bessonian. He doesn’t embarrass himself in many respects: ultra-musical – to the point of nausea, ultra-rhythmic and in perpetual motion, relying on vivid dialogue devoid of any finesse or philosophical impetus, around scenes where the comedy relies alternately on the grotesque, the vulgar, the puerile, the accumulation, the frenzied action, the supposedly embarrassing situation. There’s nothing mechanical about this film that would upset the living (Bergson had a very narrow vision of Laughter in this respect), nothing mechanical about the general. The critics will tell you as much as Greta Gerwig: this is a great homage to the American comedy of Hollywood’s golden age, the new Billy Wilder, Mankiewicz or Lubitsch you might even hear.
But then, the whole thing is stretched out beyond reason (2 hours 20 minutes that feel like 3, for a content that would have deserved half as much, all things relative), told in its entirety at face value, with no mystery, no surprises, no detours, except once again, the systematic search in post-2000 cinema for the “death” twist… Anyone who would like to escape for a few moments into the reflection that the underlying subject matter would entail (as all Baker’s previous films have allowed, through floating moments, through curious photography in the sense that the camera lingered on settings so typical of America, with colors that call for playfulness), must come up against the choice of simplistic, easy comedy, full of questions followed by immediate answers, which never allows us to question ourselves with Anora – or with Baker, who, for once, seems to have totally abandoned any personal affective relationship with his characters, who essentially become puppets waving here and there, in perpetual motion – including when it comes to bed scenes, not to say escapism. The film even veers into Tarantinesque jam in its third half, when scenes of chases and all-out fights between decerebrate Russian villains (the caricature is based on such clichés that it loses all comedic force) and poor little Anora, innocent and falsely naive, invite themselves in to embroil viewers in need of entertainment. What we loved about Baker’s cinema seems here to be relayed to who knows where, liquefied, evanescent, in the service of a cause that escapes us, if not to please the greatest number, if not to reconcile American independent cinema “à la Sundance” with the general public and its taste for cream pie, noise, fury and popcorn. This reconciliation, between Cinderella and The Hangover, between The Barefoot Countess, Diamonds on the Sofa and Reservoir Dogs, enabled Baker to win over not only Greta Gerwig‘s jury, but also a good part of the international critics. For our part, we wish Baker all the best in his quest to regain his independence and inspiration, away from (weakly) eroticized comedy, devoid of sap, flavor or counterpoint.
