With Anora’s (2024, below and feature) five wins at the 2025 Academy Awards following a Palme d’Or win at Cannes 2024, writer-director-editor Sean Baker has reached a preliminary career high that, not until too long ago, seemed anything but odds on, especially for a filmmaker who, for a considerable spell, eked out a rather shadowy existence almost alongside his characters: over the precipice, staggering, but never quite falling.
Marking one of these rare instances when a committed indie director — quasi-nevertheless — breaks through the mainstream, it is hard not to celebrate the ever-young filmmaker from the Garden State. We consider it a good enough reason to trace his career up until now.
It’s not so often we come across people who serve us their breakup story with a warm, unadulterated smile. Sean Baker is one of them. Should you ever find yourself looking into his deep blue eyes and shiny white teeth while listening to his recounting of a particular date night, you might well take him for a sociopath, telling you with a mischievous grin and trembling voice about how a trip to Lars Von Trier’s Breaking The Waves (1996) ended a relationship. Looking back at his first encounter with the Danish avant-garde filmmaker, Baker remembers telling himself: “Oh, this is special. It looks beautiful, it’s speaking to me.” If Baker found himself in conversation with the Dogme 95 director that night, his then-girlfriend, unperturbed by the on-screen drama and leaving every 15 minutes for cigarette breaks, clearly felt left out. It was in this moment, Baker recounts, that he knew their relationship didn’t have a future, a memory he looks back at as fondly as other people might at their wedding night.
What’s less obvious when beholding Baker’s still boyish looks is that this little cinematic epiphany dates back nearly 30 years. Juvenile in appearance and modest in attitude, the indie filmmaker is one of these people who would cause quite an embarrassment if you ever were to age-guess them. But once you learn that his most recent picture already marks his eighth feature film, the plain math brings things into perspective. Suddenly, the grey strains in Baker’s hair fit right into the mould of someone who recently turned 54.
Opposed to some of his illustrious contemporaries such as Christopher Nolan, Sofia Coppola and Paul Thomas Anderson, it was not until the mid-2010s that Baker finally broke into the industry, when first his iPhone-shot dramedy Tangerine (2015), but more particularly his Little Rascals-inspired The Florida Project (2017), gained him, upon its world premiere in Cannes, not only critical acclaim (as Take Out [2004], Prince of Broadway [2008] and Starlet [2012] had already done) but international attention and media coverage. Reconciling stories of bleak social realism with all-the-more colourful cinematography, Baker’s recent filmmaking is, if not novel, nonetheless distinctive at a time when studios and streamers effortlessly coax talented indie filmmakers into TV projects or yet another franchise instalment concerned with the quarrels of affluent superheroes.
For many years, though, it did not look like Baker would ever complete his lifelong dream of being invited to the bright beaches of Cannes. The constant endeavours to get financing for his films, the exhausting travels to build up a name internationally and the struggle to make at least enough money to provide for his chihuahuas Boonee and Bunsen and cover rent and healthcare — it never quite seemed to pay off. Perhaps Baker is right and everything would indeed have followed a much smoother trajectory had he only taken business as a minor during his time at the prestigious Tisch School of the Arts at NYU. Making films is always an investment of time and money, and while the former rarely ever poses a snag when you are young, Baker’s career is a good reminder that, to realise a project, all the time in the world doesn’t compensate for the costs of equipment and talent in front of and behind the camera. Which is not to say that Baker didn’t try.
Beating Spike Lee
In an unlikely (and in retrospect quite remarkable) instance, Baker spent the $50,000 he’d made for shooting commercials right after graduating on the short ends of raw 35mm film stock of Terry Gilliam’s 12 Monkeys (1995) — an investment not many aspiring filmmakers might have felt at ease with. Not those, at least, who like sequence shots, for none of these re-cans granted takes of more than a couple of minutes. Yet, listening to Baker and his ever-trembling voice when declaring his vociferous support for celluloid and the cinematic experience — a guy who proudly tells his French interviewer that he takes his Blu-ray player on his travels across the Atlantic — one may infer that this on-the-spur-of-the-moment purchase wouldn’t have seemed too bad of an investment even to a Sean Baker from a parallel world with a minor in business.
For over a year, though, these film rolls, stored in his parents’ freezer in Jersey, endured a rather miserable existence, until the 1996 shoot of his debut feature Four Letter Words (2000, above). Helming his debut at the age of 24 meant staying true to a challenge he’d taken himself up on: to outdo one of his heroes, Spike Lee, who had likewise passed through NYU and who released his feature-length debut She’s Gotta Have It (1986) at 29.
If things had worked according to plan, Baker would have beaten his idol by quite a few years. Which is to say: had Baker not fallen into a hole during the years following college, a time when the film he’d shot wouldn’t come together in the editing room and his heroin addiction ate up a fair chunk of his twenties — getting him “essentially kicked out” at Greg the Bunny1The TV puppet series Baker had co-created and became a cult show that first premiered on IFC channel and, a few years later, was even picked up by FOX and MTV. (2002-2006).
As bleak as things seemed at the time, when the frail affiliations to his former show were now reduced to a mere creator’s credit, Baker, without proper income, returned to his Jersey home, still determined not to completely cut ties with the industry. Editing wedding and corporate videos and, at one point, even running a duplication service because he “just happened to have 10 VCRs,” Baker somehow managed to remain in the industry, if only with one little toe teasing the threshold.
In parallel, Baker realised that if he ever were to finalise the film he had shot years ago, he needed to become a better filmmaker, which, in the Hitchcockian way, meant: a better editor. Having graduated from NYU right before digitalisation revolutionised postproduction, it dawned on him that the new ways of non-linear editing were nothing less than the future — if he didn’t learn it now from scratch, he might as well surrender.
So it happened that that Baker, who regards himself as a lifelong student of cinema2“I studied a lot. I’ve never stopped studying,” Baker once said, and his Letterboxd profile testifies to that., enrolled in the New School in New York, a time which not only laid the foundation for his new editing process (these days, Baker, over the course of several months, edits his films on his MacBook, quasi-isolated in his bedroom), but also brought him together with his long-time collaborator Shih-Ching Tsou (with whom, for a while, he was in a romantic relationship). Things did work out, eventually, and Baker got his Mike Leigh-inspired Four Letter Words into South by Southwest (SXSW) by March 2001 — a film that now, twenty years later, seems like an anomaly in the body of his work.
For a filmmaker who, in all but one film has proven his ongoing concern about the marginalisation of certain strata of society — be it undocumented immigrants, the working poor, the hidden homeless, trans people and sex workers — Four Letter Words, an autobiographically-inspired film about well-off white boys from the suburbs, seems like an odd starting point of a filmography for which Baker is now regarded as one of the most important social-realist voices in US cinema, just like Andrea Arnold and Ken Loach in the UK and the Dardennes in Belgium and France.
Serving Up Take-Out
In the early 2000s, when Baker and Shih-Ching Tsou lived above a Chinese take-out restaurant on the Upper Westside, their focus shifted drastically as both became increasingly aware of the thousands of undocumented Chinese immigrants in Manhattan. With Shih-Ching Tsou as a native Mandarin speaker, and attentive to the daily ongoings in and around the restaurant, Baker and Tsou, anyway inspired by the unvarnished video-filmmaking of the Dogme 95 movement led by Thomas Vinterberg and Lars von Trier, scraped together their $3000 savings, bought a Sony video camera, and started their research into the most vulnerable community among Chinese immigrants and the widespread phenomenon of smuggler’s debts.3During their research, Baker and Tsou learnt about Cheng Chui Ping aka “Sister Ping” who, between 1984 and 2000, became one of, if not the, most successful people smugglers in history.
One of these indebted immigrants is Ming, a food delivery man at a Chinese restaurant and the protagonist of Take Out (above). In the beginning, Ming is tracked down by the henchmen of a loan shark in a cockroach-infested apartment so full of nooks and crannies that it’s hard to tell how many people it inhabits. Threatening to double his debts should he fail to pay his latest instalment by the end of that day, the collectors leave Ming in a state of utter desperation. With Ming’s fantasy only going so far as to ask his co-worker for help, a scene in which he dares not look said co-worker in the eyes as he symbolically stands halfway on the steps of the restaurant cellar, equally close to sinking down as to pulling himself out of the misery, Baker follows Ming during a day that is very much structured by the opening hours of the central Chinese restaurant.
Contrary especially to European arthouse films these days, where bike rides, often the centrepiece of a montage, epitomise the bliss of leisure, the bicycle in Baker’s films is the vehicle of hustlers, a continuity line that stretches from Take Out to Red Rocket (2021). Time and again, we see Ming pedalling on his bike through the pouring Manhattan rain showers, his jacket barely keeps him from arriving completely soaked on his customers’ doorsteps, who meet him with indifference at best and racist cuss words at worst.4Those who saw Boris Lojkine’s The Story of Souleymane, which — in many ways a 2024 update of Take Out — premiered in Cannes’ Un Certain Regard section the same year Anora took home the Palm d’Or, will invariably recognise Baker’s imprint on Lojkine’s social-realist drama.
It is this urgency that forms such a stark contrast to Four Letter Words, a coming-of-age film playing out in real-time in the tradition of American Graffiti (George Lucas, 1973) and Dazed and Confused (Richard Linklater, 1993), but without ever matching their level. And while Baker’s debut does its title full justice even within the first few minutes, it lacks the insights that all of Baker’s subsequent films have in store — it may even seem difficult to regard it as part of the same filmography. A verdict even Baker might not downright reject, even though the version most of the (very few) people who saw the film (in one way or the other) on the internet since its premiere at SXSW is not what Baker calls “his version.” But while he announced a 4k restauration featuring “new colour and sound” for early 2025, Baker is quick to admit in conversation with filmmaker Brady Corbet that when making the film, his “maturity level was nowhere near” to other debutants such as Corbet with Childhood of a Leader (2015). “I hadn’t found my style yet. But I’m putting it out into the world because I spent more time on that film than on any other film, and I think it would be weird and disingenuous of me to try to bury it, to try to hide it.” For what it’s worth, Baker continues, “It does speak to my beginnings, and where I came from.” And at the very least, Baker concludes with a charming degree of self-deprecation, it might inspire some young, aspiring filmmakers, suggesting: “Look, you can start at nothing.”
In 2004, when Take Out premiered at Slamdance5 A counter-event to Sundance for micro-budget films in Park City (this year, the festival relocated to LA), it was met with lots of praise, but not with the kind of buzz a premiere at the ‘real’ Sundance might have incited. After another festival invitation to Lyon, France, at the end of the same year, Take Out sunk into complete obscurity and only found a limited release four years later, when Baker’s Prince of Broadway hit the festival circuit in 2008 — a “one-two punch,” Baker calls the media tenor of the time. Wise enough not to correct headlines as long as they run in one’s favour, he spared reporters of the depressing fact that Take Out was a four-year-old movie that heretofore hadn’t found a distributor and decided instead to just “roll with it.” Little did Baker know that despite the international praise for Prince of Broadway, his breakout Tangerine was still two films and seven years away.
The Permanent Struggle
When Baker shot Tangerine (above), a Christmas movie of the special kind about a day in the life of two Black trans sex workers in Los Angeles, he did so on three iPhone 5s (“for free, essentially”). As with the video-shot Take Out and Prince of Broadway, this wasn’t so much a renunciation of analogue filmmaking as a budgetary necessity to economise on cinematography — an act of retrenchment through which Baker could, at the very least, use part of the savings for the rent of his small apartment in West Beverly Hills. There he lived in close proximity to the LGBT Center in West Hollywood, the queer hub where he had met Mya Taylor, one of the two stars in Tangerine. Although the $100,000, at the time, spelt quite a step back from the $250,000 Baker had at his disposal for his previous film, Starlet — something that, Baker concedes, at the time made him “feel worthless” — Tangerine, in hindsight, proved to be the missing link that opened the doors to financially more ambitious projects wider than ever before.
Ensuing a triumphant premiere with rave reviews at Sundance and a long subsequent tour through the global festival circuit alongside expansive coverage (during which Baker’s humanist attempt to reflect the precariousness of two trans sex workers and normalise their profession seemed often subordinated to the aspect of how Baker and his co-cinematographer Radium Cheung had captured the sun-drenched streets of Los Angeles on iPhone cameras), Baker could finally realise his Florida Project, a story about the so-called hidden homeless in the Orlando area found by his longtime collaborator and co-writer Chris Bergoch that both had, unsuccessfully, pitched in 2011.
Centring on the young single mother Halley (Bria Vinaite) and, even more so, her six-year-old daughter Moonee (played by the astounding Brooklynn Prince, another “Prince” crossing paths with the filmmaker), whose perspective Baker, if not adopts, at least approximates, The Florida Project (above), set on the outskirts of the Orlando Disney World, introduces us to the precarious lives of people without permanent residency, who, at the mercy of their kind-hearted motel manager Bobby (Willem Dafoe), try to stay off the street on a week-to-week basis. With an unprecedented budget of around two million dollars at hand, Baker, both thematically and stylistically, picked up where its predecessor had left off — with one exception. Having demonstrated that an entire feature film such as Tangerine could be shot on just three iPhones, Baker now, save a few night scenes and some clandestine guerilla shots, returned back home to analogue film. While there is a case to be made that Baker’s filmmaking had never been as grand in aspiration and as confident in execution and that the anamorphic 35mm images endowed The Florida Project with a previously unprecedented cinematic quality, it is easy to miss the implications of the shift to the digital iPhone in the very last scene of the film, when Baker, suggesting the unsolvability of the drama in which he manoeuvred his two protagonists, resorts to the headspace of the six-year-old Moonee, who runs off with her friends to Disney World.
According to André Bazin, one of the central figures of the Nouvelle Vague in France, (analogue) film is not only a means of capturing a story but a testament to one’s existence. The digital image, in contrast, without the materiality of the film medium, becomes the unreliable fabric of fantasy, a place that never was. When Baker, looking back at Tangerine and his decision to shoot his dramedy on iPhone, notices that the lucidity of such choices often reveals itself only in hindsight, his assessment proves equally apt to describe the making of his widely celebrated successor. Still, however justified you may deem such theorisation, dismissing Willem Dafoe’s role in popularising The Florida Project would be ignorant. The first A-lister Baker ever cast, Dafoe, who had seen Tangerine and subsequently kept his eyes and ears open for whatever Baker would be up to next, actively sought him out once he learned the filmmaker was casting for The Florida Project. It seems unlikely that Dafoe remembered their first brief encounter decades ago, when Baker, joining one of his high school classmates, had helped make a documentary on the legendary Wooster Group, the actors collective that proved most informative for Dafoe’s career. Rather, it was the potential he saw in the script that led to his heartfelt performance as the avuncular motel manager Bobby, which not only served the film’s appeal to wider audiences (those which the studios typically don’t expect to leave their houses to see life in poverty on the big screen, no matter how colourfully rendered) but also garnered Dafoe his third Academy Award nomination.6Following Platoon (Oliver Stone, 1986) and Shadow of the Vampire (E. Elias Mehrige, 2001).
Choosing Dafoe for the role may seem obvious in retrospect, yet it did mark quite a divergence from how Baker — next to his occupation as writer, director, editor, producer and even sometimes-cinematographer (a job he hates doing) — usually goes about his casting. Inspired by Spike Lee, who would regularly introduce fresh faces to the big screen and set them vis-à-vis established actors and stars, Baker has never pursued celebrities for mere stardom’s sake. If anything, it seems, Baker tries to make new stars. Occasionally he gambles, as he did when he rejected the studio’s suggestion to cast an A-lister alongside Dafoe as one of the leads in The Florida Project and invited instead Bria Vinaite, whom he had found on Instagram and who ended up getting the role, despite her inexperience as an actor. The media love to hear and cover these stories, primarily because we, the audience, love them — stories that reaffirm that every once in a while, our gut feeling prevails over rigorous business calculations.
There is no doubt about the excitement Baker felt upon the sudden media interest in him and his work following the world premiere of The Florida Project in Cannes. Talking to the Hollywood Reporter in 2017 he, not devoid of pride, underlines how “getting to this couch, talking to you [the reporter], has taken 25 years.” A touch of frustration, easily enough to miss, underlies his voice when he says this, but Baker knows how to hide it behind a winsome smile so it never becomes translucent, knowing all too well that it takes a certain type of personality to persevere in an industry that doesn’t believe in the profitability of your films, to persevere even when you learn that the newest project once again didn’t reach the audience you had hoped for.
Incremental Steps
Prince of Broadway, back in 2008, was such a film that Baker thought “would open up a lot of doors,” which, in a sense, it did, even if not to the extent Baker had hoped. Fully sober again and invited back to Warren the Ape (2010) — a spin-off of his show Greg the Bunny — for a couple of seasons, Baker, similarly as with Take Out, became interested in a community that he found right there, in the centre of Manhattan, yet which only few grant a second look — the salesmen of the wholesale district. If Baker’s interest in omnipresent yet underrepresented groups of people proved crucial for finding the material for Prince of Broadway, it could have brought him only that far without the help of Prince Abu, who, not unlike Mya Taylor years later for Tangerine, introduced him to a world that is not quite secluded, yet widely overlooked. Opening the many doors of Manhattan’s garment district for Baker and his small crew, Abu made it his one condition to star as the protagonist in the filmmaker’s second research-driven movie in exchange for connecting him with the right people.
In the vein of the social realism which had defined Take Out and set it apart so conspicuously from Baker’s debut Four Letter Words, Prince of Broadway focusses on Lucky, a Ghanaian immigrant and self-proclaimed “professional salesman” who, commissioned by his partner and boss Levon (himself an immigrant from Lebanon whose Green Card is tied to his marriage with his young American wife), walks up and down the streets of Midtown South Manhattan between 6th and 9th Avenue to bait passersby into Levon’s secret backroom store stocked full with faux Prada, Gucci and Louis Vuitton. No less shiny than the brands (or at least their names) with which Lucky and Levon (played by Baker’s friend and long-time collaborator Karren Karagulian) make their money is the oversized gilded pendant worn by the titular Prince, the infant Lucky’s former girlfriend Linda drops onto him one day as he guides two middle-aged ladies — tempted by the prospect of a cheap Judith Leiber handbag — up some shady stairwells to one of the infamous yet highly frequented backrooms. A few moments later, Lucky finds himself abandoned not only by his customers but by Linda, too, as she drives away with her new boyfriend. In his hands, in return, Lucky now embraces a little infant — his alleged son of whose existence, until minutes before, he had been unaware.
If Baker’s focus on milieu studies of underrepresented people in the present-day United States were not enough to draw a line between his debut and each of his succeeding films, the American Dream marks another motif that permeates his œuvre. Clever enough never to enunciate them, his characters’ dreams nevertheless linger on in the brief moments of hope when they allow themselves to look ahead beyond their current misery. In Prince of Broadway, it is Lucky’s immigrant boss Levon who, with every attempt in pursuing his American dream of domesticity and family, pushes his party-loving wife farther away from him, not realising that his embrace of her hinges increasingly on suffocation. A lesser filmmaker might use such moments to exercise grand tragedies, yet Baker’s films, for the most part, circumvent the formulas of narrative arcs, or, at the very least, disguise them so well that they become hardly recognisable.
Prince of Broadway proved in many ways formative, not only because it marked the last time Baker had to finance a film ($47,000) and work as DP all by himself, but also because it reinforced the artistic route of research-driven social realism on which Baker had embarked with Take Out. On top of that, Prince of Broadway, crowned with prizes in Locarno and Los Angeles, helped Baker finally to make sense of the festival circuit, which, for him, filmmaking is “all about.”
Sex Works
From then onward, things seemed brighter. Moving into his small apartment in West Hollywood for his side project, the reality TV satire Warren the Ape, it was the work on said TV show that not only kept him financially afloat, but informed his next film project. If the origin story of Starlet, a dramedy much lighter both in tone and aesthetics than its two Dogme-inspired predecessors, teaches us one thing, then that sometimes it doesn’t take more than a tinge of irritation to engender a film. Once, when shooting an episode of Warren, which would often feature cameos from diverse branches of the entertainment industry, Baker overheard a porn star lamenting that she had forgotten to put her laundry into the dryer. Finding it difficult to reconcile the profanity of laundry-making with the splendour of adult entertainment, Baker proposed to his co-screenwriter Chris Bergoch a mixture of Harold and Maude (Hal Ashby, 1971) and cinema verité, a buddy comedy that centres around the friendship of two women: Jane, a young actor of the adult film industry (portrayed by Dree Hemingway, Ernest’s great-granddaughter), and the retired widow Sadie.
But despite favourable reviews and a comprehensive festival run following its world premiere at SXSW, Starlet7Which Baker would retroactively call the prelude of his ‘sex worker trilogy’ (followed by Tangerine and The Florida Project), before later, with the spontaneous realisation of Red Rocket during COVID and now Anora, expanding it to a pentalogy. proved in its explicit depiction of sexuality not only too European to reach a larger audience, but faced, upon its limited release, in Hurricane Sandy an opponent too elemental to surmount. The film hardly broke even over the years, which might explain why Baker couldn’t find more financing than the $100,000 Mark Duplass had offered him a while before. Restrictions can sometimes nurture creativity, however, and it is the dramatic irony of Baker’s career that such dispiriting obstacles never seem to drag him down, but rather help him find new means to surpass the next hurdle.
Necessity Begets Ingenuity
Looking at Baker’s overall career, it’s plain obvious that if there were even one spark of vanity in him, Red Rocket (above), his 2021 dark comedy, would have never seen the light of day — at least not during a pandemic. 2020 was the year that Baker was finally about to realise his passion project, a film he described as “Milk (Gus Van Sant, 2008), but for drug activism in Vancouver” and for the research of which he had not only moved to the Canadian West Coast a couple of years prior, but also already found financing in the twelve-million-dollar region, the magical yet arbitrary ceiling that guarantees final cut. It is to Baker’s credit that he neither indulged in desperation nor succumbed to inertia when he learned that the project, which envisions countless people marching and protesting in the streets, was cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic. All of a sudden, the time and work and passion Baker had invested in his newest and hitherto biggest project seemed evaporated, on ice at least until a safe shoot could be warranted and crowds of peacefully protesting people would no longer considered a super-spreader event, but the sign of a vibrant democracy.8With Anora’s triumphal procession up to five Academy awards in 2025 (earning Baker as the director, screenwriter, editor, and producer a record number of four Oscars for the same film), it now seems a safe bet that Baker’s personal endeavour will finally come to fruition — and rather sooner than later at that.
A notion easier said in hindsight than lived through at the time. Baker admits he “was so pissed” when his ambitious project, for which he was about to team up again with Willem Dafoe, fell apart and producers wouldn’t invest more than $1.1 million in Red Rocket, about half the budget of The Florida Project, which had not only been critically successful but had also grossed a sum five times its budget. “I was like, ‘Every one of my peers is jumping up to, like, $30 million, or $100 million,’ and I had that pity-party thing where I’m like, ‘What am I doing wrong?’”
But it isn’t like Baker wasn’t used to such punches. In a career that appears to be, from Take Out onwards, as politically driven as artistically versatile, his ability to take hits proves one of the many constants. Just like his protagonists, people you usually don’t see so much in US cinema, the boyish filmmaker from the Garden State has swallowed his pride and kept going, again and again. Seen through this lens, it is all but surprising that Baker, rather last-minute, called Simon Rex for the leading role of Red Rocket, his perhaps most formally accomplished film so far; a satirical dramedy on Mickey Davies, a “suitcase pimp” and former porn star who, upon returning penniless on a two-day bus ride to his home turf in Texas City to move back in with his wife, doesn’t take too long to come up with plans to make it back to Hollywood.
After a brief makeshift audition via phone, Baker ordered Rex a car to drive all the way from Joshua Tree, California, to Texas City to circumvent the weeklong quarantine Rex’s arrival by plane would have imposed on the film crew. With Rex’s history not only as an actor in the extra-adult industry of Hollywood but as an MTV VJ and recurring star in the Scary Movie franchise, Baker felt a closeness to Rex and his career trajectory even from a distance, seeing in him “a survivor” — a man who “could have thrown in the towel, but […] didn’t,” which, at the time, may have reminded Baker of himself.
Starting Early
The trick, in retrospect, might be in embarking on a filmmaking career so early that you cannot even remember what it feels like not making movies. Perhaps the idea has indeed, as Baker describes, “burned itself on to [his] prefrontal cortex” from that day in first grade when his mom took her six-year-old to the public library in Milburn, New Jersey, and he saw the windmill on fire in James Whale’s 1931 film Frankenstein (above).9A filial moment to which he also paid tribute on stage during one of his acceptance speeches in the Dolby Theatre, which coincided with his mother’s birthday.
Growing up in the sheltered and affluent suburbs of Jersey and getting his hands, at the age of four, on the family’s Super 8 camera with which he would, together with his sister Stephonik Youth (who has worked on several of Baker’s films), shoot many little videos (among them a Star Wars rip-off at the age of seven), Baker later became the head of his high school’s AV club, where he was also assigned to edit the video yearbook. Aware of the privileges concomitant with growing up as a white boy in American suburbia, but not yet infused with the diverse and artistic voices of foreign-language filmmakers he would later encounter in the East Village in places like the revered Kim’s Video, Baker applied to NYU with a short film on what he, with a wink, concedes to have been one of the most severe conflicts he’d ever faced in New Jersey — not returning the VHS tape back in time. That it would be NYU and not USC or UCLA in California might have been obvious, considering his proximity to the Big Apple. But when asked about why he had wanted more than anything to be at Tisch School of the Arts, Baker admits that it was especially earlier alumni like Spike Lee and Jim Jarmusch that lured him to New York, because NYC seemed “more punk rock.”
Following Baker’s career trajectory over the last decades, it seems almost absurd that he once enrolled in film studies “to make the next Die Hard (John McTiernan, 1988).” Too personal are his films, too dedicated to those who are less threatened by exceptional terrorist attacks from the outside (as in Die Hard) than by normalised politics of marginalisation from the inside. Roger Ebert’s often quoted concept of cinema as an “empathy machine” seems to reverberate in every one of Baker’s films, whose lenses transform over its 90-to-120-minute runtime to magnifying glasses on urban milieus and render visible what previously had been only peripheral.
Brighton Beach on the Med
If there was a formula attached to his research-driven films following Four Letter Words, Baker’s five-time Oscar-winning Anora marks a point of inflexion. Upon his Palm d’Or acceptance speech at the Louis Lumière Auditorium on the Croisette, Baker made no secret of the fact that, over the past 30 years, this highest of arthouse accolades had always been the ultimate goal to work toward with each new film. Looking at Anora, the film that made him the first American to win the famed prize since Terrence Malick with The Tree of Life in 2011, it wouldn’t seem that he had to outright compromise to achieve this overdue recognition. Not to the mind of Mike Leigh at least, one of Baker’s heroes, who in an interview with Film Comment called Anora “impressive,” asserting it to be “grounded, and real, sometimes funny and certainly moving and horrifying, but real.” Which, coming from Leigh, is saying something. And yet, things do appear different in Baker’s eighth feature.
Not so much in the stellar opening scene, though, in which we enter a Manhattan high-end strip club and see Drew Daniel’s camera track a row of spread-legged punters, on the lap of each of whom placed a young dancer moving harmoniously to the tunes of the Robin Schulz-remixed Take That hit “Greatest Day.” As the camera moves on, likened by Justin Chang in his New Yorker review to “a manager taking inventory,” and reaches the end of the row, the frame lingers on one particular, blue-shaded dancer as the incoming title card, in contrasting red, introduces us to her name. With the one-quarter headshot first zooming onto the woman before, somewhat unexpectedly, going through, the image now centres on the unfocused background lights, the glistening golden bokeh suggestive of triumphant visual applause.
Just as the grandiosity of the scene takes on a dreamlike and somewhat sedative quality, Baker bereaves us of the cosiness, suddenly scoring out the anthem-like soundscape as we find us among a sequence of closely intercut shots illustrative of the mundane, much less glamorous affairs of sex work. Here, Baker calls one of his trademarks to duty, the guerilla shot. Following his lead Mikey Madison, who, at this point had shadowed real dancers for several months, the camera traces the dancer’s improvised moves as she works the real-life spaces of the strip club, most of her endeavours revolving around keeping the johns in good spirits (and in line). Going by the name Ani, the confidence with which we see the dancer now approach the patrons and introduce herself to them (and thus to us) seems as essential for this job as the instinct with which she lures them into the “VIP rooms,” all of this building towards a densely interlaced money belt. Simultaneously embodying friendliness and persistence without exuding acquisitiveness, we quickly infer from her comportment alone that it is not since yesterday that Ani’s been practising this profession.
For Baker, who casts his roles mostly himself, every gaze cast in public holds a simple question: actor or passerby? He had seen Mikey Madison before in Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, but it was a screening of the 2022 reboot of Scream that sealed the deal for Baker. Still in the theatre, he’d lean over to his wife, actor Samantha Quan10To whom he has been married for several years and who functioned not only as a producer in The Florida Project, Red Rocket and Anora but has also worked as an acting coach in Baker’s most recent projects. to say: “We’re calling her agent the minute we step out of this theatre.” The rest is history: Madison, the hyper-professional she is, took Russian lessons and learned the Brighton Beach vernacular, had her father install a pole for her at home for dance practice, and spent countless hours mastering Ani’s sky-high heels. About Baker, she would later say: “I’ve never had a director see me in that way, trust me to want to collaborate on this level. I’ve honestly dreamed of having this kind of relationship with a director for my entire career, but I don’t know if I ever thought it would happen.”
In the opening minutes of Anora, we soon see her Ani wrapping barely legal Vanya around her little finger, her scrappy Russian enough to send the hedonistic youngster into raptures. What initially is just a private lap dance soon turns into a sex date in the Brighton Beach mansion that Vanya seemingly inhabits all by himself. It is only on that day that Ani finds out that she’s seeing the scion of uber-affluent Russian oligarchs. The times of Ani’s visits quickly turn into periods, first a week, for which she gets richly compensated, then, true to the motto “When in Vegas,” stretched to seeming indefinity through an impromptu wedding in Sin City.
This, at the latest, is where this eighth Baker film veers off familiar ground. Thematically, it becomes obvious in a still-early scene where we find ourselves in the opulent (albeit uninspiringly furnished) oligarch villa, across whose threshold the cleaning staff is just entering. Among them is a young brunette, whose gaze falls into the house and meets, in a way, her own reflection — with the only difference being that the woman in the reflection has her hands wrapped not around a vacuum cleaner, but the offspring of the Russian billionaire house owners. In an earlier Baker film, it would likely have been the woman with the vac into whose life we’d gain insights over the two-plus hours’ runtime. In Anora, however, the familial servant — well — merely serves as Ani’s reminder of the outside world. A world she, successively buying into the lifestyle promised by her marriage to Vanya, is (or at least feels) now in a position to dismiss.
Such dismissal, however, can only be sustained for so long. Once Igor and Garnik (played by Yura Borisov and Vache Tovmasyan), two well-meaning gorillas employed by the family, pull in the driveway and catch wind of the juvenile marriage, the film takes on a different genre. Enter Karren Karagulian, the one actor who’s appeared in every single one of the director’s films, and whom Baker by turns calls his “lucky charm” and his “Bob De Niro.” In the world of Anora, Karagulian goes by the name Toros, the higher-tier Armenian American you call when shit hits the fan but you don’t dare call the ‘real’ boss.
It was already in 2009 when Baker and Karagulian, who’d first bonded over their love for Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in America (1984) during Baker’s time at NYU, schemed out a story about the world of some Coney Island mobsters, a milieu Karagulian grew familiar with ever since he washed ashore Brighton Beach at the age of 20, where he first sold caviar to stay financially afloat before later marrying a Russian-American woman (who also plays his wife in Anora). Back then, however, the producers wanted someone else for Karagulian’s part, i.e. the Armenian gangster: “Someone like Brad Pitt, an American doing an accent.” But “because Sean is so dedicated to authenticity, he would just refuse them all,” he adds. If Karagulian’s anecdote echoes Baker’s casting of Bria Vinate in The Florida Project, it suggests not so much a coincidence as it attests to the scrupulousness with which he, time and again, refused the easy way.
Once Karagulian’s Toros enters the scene and finds not only the unwished-for wedding confirmed, but Vanya gone, he’s already missed the centrepiece of Baker’s dark comedy, the scene around which the director builds the entire narrative. In a Safdies-inspired orchestration of chaos, Vanya, irrespective of Ani’s fate, takes flight from the stage, leaving newly-wed Ani fighting and swamping the clumsy henchmen. Initially set up as a modern reworking of Cinderella, Baker’s script now gives way to a foul-mouthed scavenger hunt for Vanya, with the quasi-kidnapped Ani coerced into teaming up with the Toros-led Russian-Armenian task force. If Justin Chang in his review speaks of Anora as a “by turns teeming slice of life and a virtuoso farce [that] reveals itself in the final stretch as a cracked fairy tale,” he does capture Anora’s structural composition, yet neglects the novelty within Baker’s overall project.
Whereas all of Baker’s films leading up to Anora were primarily devoted to the texture of everyday life within the greater or smaller confines of a given community, Anora, bylined as “A love story from Sean Baker,” is much more committed to the fluctuating dynamics of its narrative construction and its position within the genres and their concomitant tropes. In other words, whereas Baker’s previous films mostly took an interest in character and milieu, Anora is much more concerned with plot machinations and their relationality within film history (i.e. Fellini’s Nights of Cabiria [1957] and Pretty Woman [Gary Marshall, 1990]). This is not to say that Baker suddenly discards former interests in loci and their peculiarities. After all, a good chunk of the middle of the film consists of fluent transitions from Russian to Armenian to English, and vice versa, as the unlikely conjoint patrol scouts Brooklyn’s “Little Odessa”11One of Brighton Beach’s many nicknames. for any trace of Vanya, again pivoting to what Baker describes as “running the gun guerilla craziness” — with his “candid camera” hidden across the sidewalk, following the wired actors as they stir up the local shops and restaurants. This comes with its own risks, since the crew, following each clandestine take, depends on the unbeknownst extras’ agreement to be featured in the film. According to Baker, however, this works “almost 99% of the time.”
The same section of the film, however, illustrates the price Baker pays for a strict focus on plot. At one point, after Vanya’s uncooperative friends at the candy shop fall victim to Igor’s and Garnik’s vandalism, Ani steers back toward the SUV, but is snarled at by Toros that it only takes “five minutes” on foot to Vanya’s next potential hiding place. Not given a real choice, Ani reluctantly follows suit as the scavenger hunt continues. Then a sudden cut, and we see the troupe arrive at Tatiana Grill, a famed Russian eatery across Coney Island’s Little Stone Pier. Walking up the entry door, Ani complains: “This took way fucking longer than five minutes!” As can be inferred from this strange choice of editing, the notion of time in Anora is to be suspended, signified, if anything, through changes of scenery.
A Change of Tone?
If we understand Baker’s œuvre primarily as a series of glimpses into the texture of contemporary American life on the margins, Anora marks a state of exception —a fleeting moment in time in which an all-too-rosy future opens up before our protagonist’s eye. In one way or the other, every single one of Baker’s films is, at the same time, about the ineradicability and unattainability of the American Dream. More than in his most recent, much more character-driven films, which presented this premise through the prism of a child’s (The Florida Project) or manchild’s (Red Rocket) consciousness, Anora hinges crucially on our ability to identify with Ani’s longing for this better future. If this narratological pull fails, however, we find ourselves positioned somewhat above the titular protagonist. Perhaps for that reason, Baker felt that after “taking the audience on a rollercoaster ride through tones and genres, I knew that I had to bring them back to a place of grounded reality.” Which, in this case, means diverting from the end scenes of Baker’s two previous films that released the audience into the dreamy headspace of their protagonists. At the end of Anora, Ani may well be shattered. But she is — if she ever was — no longer delusional.
This leads us back to the “cracked” part of this fairy tale. In the centre of some of the best-known fairy tales — say The Little Mermaid or Rumpelstiltskin — there is a deal to which the bonhomous characters fatally agree. In her stellar review of Anora, Rayne Fisher-Quann places similar importance on the notion of dealmaking, which in times of a notorious self-proclaimed dealmaker as the American president might in and of itself present a valuable perspective on Anora. With regards to Ani, it also wipes away the idea of a mere ingénue succumbing to her own expectations. Or, in Fisher-Quann’s words: “She’s not an idiot: she’s just trying to get the best deal in a world where few deals are offered to her.”
Such deals — the compromises people (some more than others) are forced to agree upon — form the fabric of American life that Baker has spent his career examining. If you won’t see him stop anytime soon, it is not so much because Anora, beside all its laurels, is far and away Baker’s greatest commercial hit so far, clocking in at over $52 million on a six-million-dollar budget. Rather, it is simply due to his one central conviction: Movies “can change the world, they really can.” There are few filmmakers out there who could credibly make this statement. Baker is one of them. His wins of first Europe’s and now Hollywood’s most prestigious award within less than a year mark the overdue accolades in a career that’s been anything but easy, but that, and this is perhaps Baker’s greatest merit, never gave way to cynicism.
Patrick Fey is a freelance critic, whose writing has appeared on Kino-Zeit, Critic.de, Filmstarts and Moviebreak.