Sean Baker and the Long Road to the Palme d’Or
Earlier this year, the Cannes Film Festival jury awarded the Palme d’Or to an independent American comedy-drama called Anora, directed by a filmmaker who’s been working in the indie scene for over 20 years without Oscar consideration or graduating to big-budget studio pictures. The last time Cannes gave their biggest award to an American film was The Tree of Life thirteen years ago, which was a film that spanned the entire history of time in what many my believed was a culminating artistic statement from a highly-respected legend in cinema. Anora, a low-budget indie production with no major stars that mostly takes place over 24 hours, seems almost minor in comparison to that film’s scope.
But for Sean Baker, the film represents a payoff of over two decades of goodwill he’s accumulated in the world of American independent cinema. Simply put, he makes films that financiers and investors often tell you can’t get made in today’s market. His films never have any stars (with the minor exception of Willem Dafoe in The Florida Project) and concern themselves with complicated figures just trying to get by. These characters will often resort to sex work, sometimes as a defining trait of their character like in Tangerine and Anora, and sometimes simply because they view it as the easiest way out of their situation, like in The Florida Project. The characters you see in Sean Baker’s films are often foul-mouthed, unlikable, and uncomfortably realistic. Dialogue constantly overlaps and is often delivered through characters yelling at each other, something that reaches a pinnacle at the beginning of the second act of Anora.
But it’s because of, not in spite of, these characteristics that make Sean Baker’s cinema a breath of fresh air, and audiences have taken notice over the years. If you’re not tuned into the indie film sphere closely, though, all the buzz around his latest film might come as a surprise. Where exactly did this director come from?
The Early Days
Even during the 2000s when directors like the Duplass Brothers, Greta Gerwig, and Joe Swanberg were able to create a small cottage industry of no-budget “mumblecore” movies with their friends, Sean Baker’s films took a long time to catch on. Films like Four Letter Words and Prince of Broadway received festival acclaim but achieved little to no theatrical screenings. There’s no set reason why his early films didn’t catch on, although it’s worth noting that, as opposed to his peers who were often playing privileged, hyperliterate characters in more comedic settings, Baker often opted for a more neorealistic approach, capturing characters struggling in the current-day economy at a time when few indie films that made a big splash tackled such subjects.
His most popular film from this early era was Take Out, a simple story following a day in the life of an undocumented Chinese immigrant working as a deliveryman for a Chinese restaurant. The film’s drama comes from the smugglers that brought him to the U.S. who demand payment on his debts by the end of the day. The film was shot for $3,000 on early digital video that looked crude even back in 2004 - especially when screening in any major movie theaters meant the film would have to be blown up to 35mm. It premiered at Slamdance in 2004, but did not see theatrical release until 2008 when, to make matters worse, the film was tied up in a legal battle against another indie film also called Take Out. Today, the film is highly regarded and included as part of The Criterion Collection, but despite winning the John Cassavetes Award at the Independent Spirit Awards that year, it would be four years from that film’s national release before he would return to the big screen.
2012-2016: Indie Breakthrough
His 2012 film Starlet was shot on a budget of $250,000 - which still put it on the microbudget end of film production but was his largest film to date. The story centered around an unlikely friendship between a porn star in her early 20s trying to get by in L.A. and an 85 year-old woman she meets at a garage sale. The tenderness of their relationship mixed in with the neorealistic look at early 2010s San Fernando Valley attracted the attention of SXSW, where the film premiered to widespread acclaim and was picked up by Music Box Films. While the film didn’t exactly light the box office on fire, it did make over $100,000 and found an audience in the early days of internet streaming.
His biggest breakthrough to date, though, happened in 2015 with the film Tangerine. Not only was the film executive-produced by the Duplass Brothers (the first time a major name was attached to one of his productions), but he also gained widespread notoriety for shooting the entire film on the iPhone 5S. He used a number of apps and extensions to properly colorize and control the aperture and focus of the camera, but his story became an inspiration to scores of young filmmakers looking to get their foot in the door by making movies with the equipment they have on hand.
But beyond the means of production, the story was Baker’s closest look at the lives of sex workers yet, adopting the day-in-the-life approach of Take Out to the story of Sin-Dee Rella, an L.A.-based transgender sex worker released from prison on Christmas Eve. After meeting her friend Alexandra, a fellow transgender sex worker, she discovers that her boyfriend has been cheating on her with a cisgender woman. Not willing to take this lying down, Sin-Dee and Alexandra embark on a madcap journey across the city to track her boyfriend and his new girlfriend down, leading to a final confrontation between them and a number of other characters met along the way in a climax that feels reminiscent of screwball comedy. The only difference is that, despite the shenanigans and frenetic atmosphere, Baker never loses touch of the social realism at the core of the picture, and it was this potent mixture of comedy and drama - as well as highlighting a subculture that never sees representation on the big screen - that made this his biggest film to date.
2017-2024: Mainstream Success
Instead of sticking to the iPhone, he leveraged his newfound success into The Florida Project, a social realist take on a traditional kids coming-of-age story. The film follows a number of people who essentially live at a cheap motel on the outskirts of Walt Disney World in Orlando, Florida, but focuses specifically on the children who live on this property. Their parents are destitute, sometimes violent drug addicts resorting to crime to survive, but by focusing the story on the children, Baker paints a picture of joy and life found in circumstances much of America would find squalid.
With the help of distributor A24 - the year after their Best Picture win for Moonlight - The Florida Project became Baker’s biggest film by a landslide until Anora’s success. By balancing out his socially conscious look at this particular environment with an almost-fantastical view of the world presented through the three children at the center of the film, critics and audiences everywhere fell in love with the film and it made $11 million worldwide - a far cry from the early days of Baker’s career.
His next film, Red Rocket, faced a much steeper uphill climb to mainstream success. Despite receiving the same kind of excellent reviews Baker had received for over a decade by this point, the film focused on a deeply unlikable yet fascinating male hustler at its center and the havoc he wreaks upon his hometown when he returns one random day. Once again, A24 distributed the film but, since the film was shot in 2020 and released while movie theaters and festivals around the world were still in the process of reopening, it didn’t see quite the same level of success that The Florida Project had. Still, the film was enough to launch Suzanna Son’s career and relaunch the career of Simon Rex, an MTV VJ who had never had the chance to play any serious roles before.
This success led to the $6 million Anora, which has connected with audiences in a major way that Baker’s previous films had not quite achieved. Beyond the Palme d’Or, it has already grossed over $16 million worldwide and is expected to only grow as Oscar season gets closer. And yet, he did this by sticking to his guns and doing the types of stories he does best, as the film is a socially conscious neorealist tale about a sex worker struggling to get by in today’s economy and the screwball situation she finds herself in when she impulsively marries the wealthy son of a Russian oligarch. People have already compared the film to a more profane, unhinged version of Pretty Woman, but Anora contains all the preoccupations Sean Baker has followed for his career thus far. Like Wes Anderson with The Grand Budapest Hotel, it feels like Sean Baker will see his biggest success to date with a film that condenses and summarizes so many of his pet themes and obsessions, so where he goes from here will be anybody’s guess.