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.
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