A poor man's Sean Baker movie

Although director Gia Coppola comes from a family lineage of a very different sort of filmmaking -- several different sorts of filmmaking within one family, I should say, this one probably most resembling her aunt Sofia -- the person most responsible for the look and feel of The Last Showgirl may be the man who just won all the Oscars this past year. (When The Last Showgirl also might have been up for an Oscar, if the campaign to get Pamela Anderson nominated had had legs.)

That's right, I'm not sure if we would have The Last Showgirl without Sean Baker.

As you would know if you've followed Baker's career -- or read this post -- Baker loves him some movies about sex workers. I don't know if you would actually call what Anderson's Shelly does for her career "sex work," but she's a Vegas showgirl whose breasts are bared during her Rockettes-like act. She's selling sex if not actually giving it, and it becomes clear that any equivalent replacement career she'd have, if her show were to be shut down (which it is in the course of this narrative), would be selling sex a lot more.

Then there's the fact that reference is made to the fact that she could be (but isn't) one of those showgirls who hustles on the side -- in other words, is available for "bonus activities" for a particular sort of fan who waits at the stage door after the show. She actually does have a possible interest in one such fan, never seen on screen, which is why the subject comes up at all.

It might feel even more like a Baker film -- particularly Baker's last film, the one that won all the Oscars -- because Anora also spends time in Las Vegas, the setting for Coppola's film. Of course, since the movies were released within only a few months of each other, that's just a coincidence, because of course it is.

Though the thing that really cemented the Baker connection for me, after I'd already made the initial connection with the sex work theme, was the way it's shot. I was reminded a bit of Baker's The Florida Project, which has a lot of external shots of characters in an around hotels and establishments on busy commercial or industrial thoroughfares. They share a dreamy indie sensibility that Baker did not pioneer, but may have helped bring to greater prominence. 

If we are taking about The Last Showgirl relative to Anora specifically, I have a comparison between the two films that might surprise you. I definitely think Anora is the superior film, but not by the margin you might expect. And it all comes down to how Baker and Coppola have chosen to develop, or not develop, their main character.

Whether he meant to or not, I feel like Baker left his titular character as a bit of a cypher. We spend a lot of time with Anora -- she's in practically every scene -- but all that time has not allowed us to get to know her any better. I kind of think that was an intentional choice by Baker, not an oversight, but that doesn't mean it worked any better for me. The distance I felt from Anora prevented me from getting on board with the movie to the same extent other people did.

With Shelly, screenwriter Kate Gersten has done a much better job of rounding out her history, and has not had to hit us over the head to do it. That also means that Gersten and Coppola's film is more conventional in some ways, since it really is Screenwriting 101 to give your main character a back story, past traumas that come back to haunt her, an estranged daughter, that sort of thing. We get all that for Shelly, and Anderson's performance -- which I initially wasn't sure about -- really helps sell it. 

If it makes me a basic bitch for preferring this approach to Baker's intentional deviation from it, well then, a basic bitch I am. 

Sean Baker is so predictable

I saw The Substance on Friday and I really, really liked it. I'm not going to go into any detail now, because there may be more to say about this film in my year-end top ten. May be? Will be.

But I've been thinking about it enough that I was drawn to a mention of it in an email from KCRW, which I still get even though I don't live in Los Angeles anymore. 

The email mentioned that the movie was in contention for this year's Palme d'Or at Cannes, but lost out to Sean Baker's Anora.

Without knowing anything about Anora or having ever even heard of it before -- yes, I guess I'm not as up on my Cannes news as I should be -- I said to myself, "Oh this must be Sean Baker's latest movie about sex workers." Thinking that I was making a joke, because surely Baker would branch out at some point.

And yet when I went to IMDB, I cracked myself up not seven words into the movie's logline, which starts: "Anora, a young sex worker from Brooklyn ..."

I didn't need to keep reading.

Now don't get me wrong. I like Baker's work. "Love" might be too strong a word, especially after the disappointment that was Red Rocket, but he's a two-time top ten finisher in my year-end rankings with Tangerine and The Florida Project. Starlet probably wouldn't have made my top ten if I'd seen it in time to rank it that year, but I really liked that film, too.

But if I'm going to give Guy Ritchie a hard time for remaking the same gangster movie over and over again, why does Baker get off the hook just for being more artsy?

And at least Guy Ritchie made some random Disney movies like Aladdin, not to mention two Sherlock Holmes movies. Baker has never made a movie that did not have a sex worker in it, usually starring in it. 

Is it enough to earn Baker, a highly respected director for good reason, my snark?

The answer is, evidently, yes.

Though maybe it wouldn't be if I hadn't really disliked the last sex worker movie, Red Rocket. Until that point, I thought Sean Baker could do not wrong. But he did wrong. It was just too long and too much Simon Rex being a total knob.

The thing is, it is almost like Baker is pathologically not embarrassed about this proclivity. 

As a person who likes to daydream that I might write a book someday, I always think about things I might talk about in that book, and it wouldn't be any good unless I went into some sordid territory. But then I always think "Well, I don't really want my parents to read that" or "Well, I don't really want my kids to read that." I still have one parent left, hopefully for at least another decade but possibly a lot longer, and I hope to have two kids still around until long after I'm gone. So if I'm really worried about exposing any secrets I might have -- or really, making anybody even think the things I write about might stem from personal knowledge of embarrassing things -- then I'll just never write about those things.

Baker is my opposite in that regard. He doesn't give a flying flip if anyone thinks he's been with hundreds of prostitutes. I suspect he hasn't, but his fascination with these people as dramatic figures, as protagonists, has to have some sort of origin. I mean, it's clear from his films that he is interested in downtrodden Americans, but do they always have to be sex workers?

Today, as I was going back to get the exact wording of the Anora logline in order to write this post, I finally read the rest of it.

"Anora, a young sex worker from Brooklyn, meets and impulsively marries the son of an oligarch. Once the news reaches Russia, her fairytale is threatened as the parents set out for New York to get the marriage annulled."

Well if I were worried about Baker branching out, this calms my fears a bit. This whole Russian oligarch angle is something distinctly new in his filmography, and maybe it will bear fruit. It even sounds like another further step into the world of comedy that he only first explored with Red Rocket -- not successfully there, but perhaps here.

And if it doesn't turn out to be branching out, after all?

Well, Baker does make more good sex worker movies than bad ones.