Last weekend, American director Sean Baker received the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival for Anora. As far as is known, this film is about a prostitute from Brooklyn who marries the son of a Russian oligarch marinated in dollars, and from whose basal tone of comedy germinates a compassionate look towards her characters and devastating towards the environment in which she lives. they move That is, the United States of America.
We saw this before, in Red Rocket (2021, available on MovistarTV), where a retired porn actor tries to relaunch himself as a producer in the field, recruiting in his native Texas what – he believes – will be the next female star of adult entertainment. Yes, it smells of comedy – and of the picaresque, due to the audacity and bad fortune of its protagonist –, but the aftertaste that remains is that of a bitter portrait of an impoverished country and channeled by the fantasies that feed its lifestyle (and of death).
We also saw this before, in 2017 to be exact, when Baker became internationally known with the film to which we will dedicate these lines: The Florida project. In reality, it is not a project but a projects, a huge, colorful motel that has become the permanent residence of its impoverished inhabitants; a colorful building that strives not to clash with the tourist cluster that surrounds an invisible Disney World, located a few blocks away.
Unlike his later works, this one is strengthened by its choral vocation and is challenged by having the high voices of several children in its chorus. You could say that the solo voice is from Moonee (Brooklynn Prince), a precocious and uncontrollable six-year-old girl, whose summer vacation consists of a string of pranks – some of which are not at all harmless – with a cast of henchmen that usually mutates quickly. Because in the project, people arrive and people leave.
The sometimes sordid project is run by Bobby (Willem Dafoe), a kind of mega-janitor who solves problems and imposes a certain discipline from a mesocratic awareness of the deteriorating situation of his tenants. Therefore, Bobby is also the ambassador of the feelings of the average viewer, and his kindness always pushed to the limit seems to be the appropriate response – for us – to so much despair. Bobby is both the manager of a shelter and the guard of a prison, because in places like this both things are easily confused.
The beginning of the film is focused on the children, on their wandering and their adventures, as well as on various places inside and outside the project: horizontal urban spaces with a lot of cement, gigantism and huge themed advertisements for ice cream, toys or hamburgers. As if everything were an extension of the inherent childishness of the Disney world, without any of the signs of urban pathology, such as graffiti or battered bus stops, because it is expressed in another way.
In fact, the film’s photography is designed to saturate the colors that come and go between unusually clear air and light (the Florida sun), partly to adequately envelope the innocence of these feral children, partly because those colors and that clean light is usually the resources with which Western metropolises filmed the third world to distinguish it from their own.
However, gradually the bright colors of the film seem to look less and less as the story moves inside the motel and focuses on the adults who live and live poorly there. Especially in Moonee’s young, single mother, Hailley (Bria Vinaite), who solves with ingenuity and some apathy the challenge of supporting the little girl, whom she adores, but with the limitations that structural poverty usually imposes.
Because in reality, that is what this film is about, a physical structure that houses diverse stories of structural poverty, of that poverty manufactured so that it cannot escape itself, no matter how much its victims repeatedly hit their heads against the many walls of this structure.
The subsequent fall is therefore a tragedy. Something that can be considered fair and deserved for the mother, but not for the little girl, and yet it is presented to us as what it is: a complex human situation, with people overcome by their emotions and others incapable of dealing with the other people’s emotions.
Far from the sociological record of Neil Simon, the quasi-documentary view of Pedro Costa and the apparently distanced asceticism of the Dardenne brothers, what Sean Baker offers us to talk about poverty is a fiction conscious of being so. A fiction that – at least this time – eludes genre codes, which are usually very useful as a guide and decoy to attract unwary people to the room but which would have boxed the story into a contour that is too narrow for what it really contains.
When the concentration of tension cannot be contained by any genre or by the contours the film has given itself, the film flees.
We will not say what exactly this escape consists of, but it is worth highlighting that the meaning of this escape uses the nearby Disney World – whose shadow as an artificial paradise loomed throughout the film – to launch frantically into fantasy; precisely in a space that is marketed as a fantasy world.
The fact that this beautiful, luminous and terrible fiction could only be closed by appealing to this resource in a very original way, reminds us of two things. One is that fantasy exists precisely to escape. The other is that fiction and fantasy are not the same.
About…
Original title: The Florida Project (2017)
Nationality: USA
Directed by: Sean Baker
Duration: 111 minutes
Can be seen at: Max
