What is the right kind of sensitivity? Is there a truer, better form of compassion? Those are questions I often have after seeing a movie by Sean Baker, a filmmaker who affectionately and bluntly probes into the lives of a sort of invisible American under-class. His films, including the Palme d’Or winning Anora (opening in US theaters on October 18), force us to confront our politically correct values, to investigate the line between decency and exploitation.
Baker has made four films about sex work, traversing between porn, prostitution, and exotic dancing. He has also made films about those living on the dire economic fringes, hustlers and hangers-on feverishly treading water. While early works like 2004’s Take Out and 2008’s Prince of Broadway deal strictly with the immigrant experience in New York City, his later films bring sex into the economic picture, laying bare the precarious realities and wild hopes of people so often dismissed, discounted, and denigrated for their profession.
It’s noble sociological work, in some ways. But watching Baker’s films, one also may question whether he—a cis, white, straight, prep-school educated filmmaker—is the best steward of stories like Tangerine (2015), a dash through the night following two trans sex workers of color as they scramble to keep afloat in Los Angeles. And what of 2012’s Starlet, a mostly prickly-sweet story of a young woman befriending an elderly widow that takes a graphic detour into pornography? What is it that drives Baker toward this subject matter so far outside his own experience? Is it prurience, or altruistic fascination?
Maybe it’s both. And maybe the above questions become pedantic and fussy in the light of the films themselves. While revisiting some of his work in the lead-up to Anora’s release, I was surprised to be reminded of the softness and care of Baker’s gaze, his gentle but persuasive insistence on the humanity of those so routinely dehumanized. Of them, only the grim groomer fable Red Rocket (2021), so propulsively led by a charming then menacing Simon Rex, is a study in cynicism, in nearly unmitigated darkness. Otherwise, Baker seems to understand both the nosy curiosity that compels people toward his films and their roles as potential tools of empathy.
Tangerine, starring previously untested actors Kitana Kiki Rodriguez and Mya Taylor, is a rollicking, precarious riot, made with Baker’s signature controlled verve. It is also a strikingly poignant film, gracefully allowing a quotidian plainess to complicate its portrait of lives lived outside the mainstream. It ends in a humble laundromat, while one working girl waits for her clothes to be cleaned and her friend and colleague extends her the simplest kind of comfort.
Baker has said in interviews that this is a core interest of his: showing sex workers in the so-called “real world,” properly contextualizing them as not so different from anyone else. Baker was inspired to make Starlet by conversations he had with porn actors while working on a television show early in his career, in which he realized how, well, regular many people in that industry are, despite the often irregular or predacious conditions of their work. (He also saw something unnerving in many of the men in that field, which inspired Red Rocket.)
Starlet is an arresting statement of intent in that regard, functioning mostly as a low-to-the-ground version of a familiar heartwarming story. Dree Hemingway plays a young woman, Jane, living in the San Fernando Valley. By chance, she befriends a lonely old grump played by Besedka Johnson, in her first and last film role. Jane’s life is not blessed, certainly—she has money woes and a shifty pair of roommates—but she has an easygoing resilience. When we do finally see her at work on a porn set—set up as something of a twist in the story—we encounter mostly a professional bonhomie, politenesses and encouragements shared between coworkers. There is graphic (and, I think, simulated) sex, but it is brief and not quite leering. Baker is seeking to demystify rather than titillate.
Of course, not all sex work, in the porn world or beyond, is safe and supportive. Baker is careful to suggest this in Starlet, and certainly in Tangerine—where the two women at the center are at far more immediate risk than Jane of Starlet. It’s that frankness, about good and bad coexisting so closely, that can raise one’s hackles about Baker’s films. In them, is he being flippant and deliberately evasive, or is he showing a more measured, more holistically understood version of reality?
