A trio of Sean Baker films

Notes on a trio of Sean Baker’s films:

Take Out (2004, co-directed with Shih-Ching Tsou)
Starlet (2012)
Red Rocket (2021)

As I await Sean Baker’s Anora, the Cannes 2024 Palme d’Or winner, I realized I had no notes on his earlier films that I had seen as Tangerine, The Florida Project and missed seeing a few of his other films. As a means of correction, here are notes on 3 films I had not seen previously.

Slice of American life

One aspect of Sean Baker’s cinema is his ability to show a slice of American life that commercial Hollywood studio ignores. He sheds light on those people / stories not covered by mainstream cinema and does so in a natural realistic manner. That doesn’t mean his films are devoid of drama but instead his film shows reality without any of the dressed up glamour that Hollywood indulges in. In addition, his films feature characters directly or indirectly involved in the adult film industry or associated with them. Take Out is an exception to that.

Food and Delivery

Take Out came out a year before Ramin Bahrani’s Man Push Cart (2005) was released and both films shed light on different aspects of American food delivery in New York. While Man Push Cart highlights the one-man food cart, Take Out focuses its attention on door-to-door food delivery. The main character in the film, Ming Ding (Charles Jang), waits for the restaurant food to be made and immediately get on his bicycle to deliver that food, no matter the weather. Take Out is shown with a high degree of realism and approaches aspects of Cinéma vérité documentary style.

Take Out, co-directed with Shih-Ching Tsou, stands apart from the remaining Sean Baker films in not having any association with adult film industry/sex workers as his later films would. The film does contain Baker’s now expected signature in trying to humanize his characters and inviting audience a glimpse into the everyday harsh realities of people doing whatever it takes to make a living.

The Mikey connection

Starlet and Red Rocket are two different films but they are connected by the character Mikey even though the character is played by two different actors in each film and it is never truly spelled out that Red Rocket is the next chapter in Mikey’s life. As Red Rocket describes, the term Mikey is slang for “suitcase pimp” which captures the essence of both Mikey’s in the two films, the character played by James Ransone in Starlet and that by Simon Rex in Red Rocket. A few dialogues by Mikey in Red Rocket (such as installation of pole in living room) seem to indicate that he may be the same person who lived in LA in Starlet and has now left to move back to Texas City in Red Rocket. In Starlet, Mikey’s character is on the fringes even though he is indirectly pulling the strings which impact the lives of the two female characters Jane (Dree Hemingway), Melissa (Stella Maeve) who share an apartment with him. Starlet is Jane’s film about an unexpected friendship with Sadie (Besedka Johnson) while Mikey is in almost every frame of Red Rocket. Even though Red Rocket is about Mikey, the film shows the toxic and damaging impact he has on the female characters around him including his wife Lexi (Bree Elrod) and 17 year old Raylee (Suzanna Son).

Red Rocket's Mikey is a dangerous male who is the perfect description of a slime ball and whose predatory behaviour can wreck the lives of anyone in his path. The film shows how he impacted Lexi via the adult industry but Mikey never thinks about anyone else. He is only thinking of himself and his next pay check and that is why he tries to groom Raylee into being an adult movie star.

Other directors would have treated Mikey’s character (Red Rocket) in a different light and would have focused on his villainy right up front. However, Sean Baker’s style allows him to present situations and characters as naturally as possible. This way, audience can watch the characters go about their lives, their daily hustles, and then can form their own conclusions via the actions of the characters.

The Films of Joanna Hogg

Notes on the Six Feature Films directed by Joanna Hogg:

Unrelated (2007)
Archipelago (2010)
Exhibition (2013)
The Souvenir (2019)
The Souvenir: Part II (2021)
The Eternal Daughter (2022)

While viewing Joanna Hogg’s recent film The Eternal Daughter, I noticed that I had never written about any of her films on this blog. This felt like a glaring omission especially since I owned DVDs of her first 3 features Unrelated, Archipelago and Exhibition and saw her films in order of their release. Here finally are some thoughts/notes as a means of correction.

Messy / Strained Relationships

All six of Joanna Hogg’s films depict complicated dynamics of a relationship with brutal honesty. That means, her films don’t shy away from fights, loud arguments between couples and family members that spill out for others to witness. Family tensions are depicted in Unrelated (father-son), Archipelago (mother-sister vs brother), The Eternal Daughter (mother-daughter) while relationships are under a very close microscope in Exhibition (a marriage on the verge of collapse), The Souvenir (toxic male). In majority of these films, the arguments and shouting leave the confines of a bedroom or a dining room but they never leave the space of a villa, house or hotel. That means, her films only examine the impact and fallout of a relationship to those within a closed inner circle and don’t extend to the larger society as a whole.

Joanna Hogg also examines British class differences in the inner circle of these families and their friends. Archipelago stands out in this regard in how a brother and sister differ in their treatment of a hired cook. Edward (Tom Hiddleston) would like to invite their cook Rose (Amy Lloyd) to sit with them at the dinner table but his sister Cynthia (Lydia Leonard) and mother think that is unreasonable. Cynthia even gets upset at Edward’s chats with Rose. Majority of the characters in Hogg's films are financially well off and their elitist behaviour is highlighted in how the characters treat others around them.

Artistic Voice / Challenges

The Souvenir and its sequel, The Souvenir: Part II illustrate the difficulty in making a film starting from the funding process. The films, especially the sequel, highlight the impact a director’s decisions or indecisions can have on the rest of the crew. There are many real life stories about directors shooting a film without a script and such efforts are often lauded as a major achievement but the reality is that there is often a cost impact of wasted film shots or not having a bound script. The Souvenir: Part II shows the frustrations of the cinematographer and rest of the crew in not having clear instructions on where the camera must be placed.

Exhibition examines the creative challenges that contemporary artists have and depicts the equivalent of a writer’s block on an artist (art block). The challenges in expressing one’s vision and having others understand it ties this film to that of the two Souvenir films.

3 year Timeline

There was an equal 3 year gap between the release of her first 3 features: Unrelated,  Archipelago and Exhibition. Then Hogg didn’t release a film for a 6 year gap but the remaining three films were all released within a span of 3 years. This quick release of 3 films in 3 years means that overall, she has maintained a consistent output over the 6 features.

Other Notes

The two Souvenir films have gotten plenty of critical acclaim but Unrelated remains my favourite Joanna Hogg film. Even though it is her debut film, Unrelated is a breath of fresh air compared to how characters are depicted in other British films. Joanna Hogg’s contemplative style allows audience to infer their own sentiments about characters based on snippets of dialogue, body language and how the characters behave. I still recall feeling that Unrelated heralded the arrival of a new director to watch. With just a single feature film to go off, it wasn’t clear what direction her other films would take. Now revisiting Unrelated after having seen all her other features allows me to see how this film fits in with her style. There is a sense of autobiographical element to all her films filtered via focus on relationships and class differences of her characters. We first see this in Unrelated and she expands on this in the subsequent five features.

Tom Hiddleston may be a familiar name now but it is important to note that he made his feature film debut in Hogg’s Unrelated. His second feature film happened to be Joanna Hogg’s second directorial feature Archipelago.

Reference Reading:

Seventh Row on Joanna Hogg.

Hillary Weston Interview on Criterion.

Rachael Rakes on her first 3 features.

The blood soaked cinema of Coralie Fargeat

Reality+ (2014, Short film 22 min)
Revenge (2017)
The Substance (2024)

Analyzing a director’s style just via 3 films can feel dicey especially if one of those 3 films is a short film as sometimes directors need a few films to find their voice. However, in the case of Coralie Fargeat her stylistic voice booms loud and clear from just this small sample set. Her newest film The Substance clearly builds on visual and thematic elements she had in her 2014 short film Reality+ and her previous feature Revenge. In fact, if one only sees the final few minutes of The Substance after seeing Revenge, it would be clear that this was a Coralie Fargeat feature. Her signature is there for all to see.

A better version of yourself but for a limited time

The core question at the center of The Substance is “Have you ever Dreamt of a better of yourself?”.

Fargeat first explored this idea in Reality+ where characters can overlay their physical appearance with a desired Avatar of their choosing after they undergo a procedure. There is a time-limit to their physical appearance (12 hours) after they which they return to their regular self and they cannot transform into their Avatar again until a certain waiting period has lapsed. The Substance also has a time limit for the new and improved version of oneself but it is for alternating 7 day intervals. Meaning, the self and other-self live their lives in alternating weeks.

Other than the time-limit, there is another difference between how Reality+ and The Substance approach the self vs other-self. In Reality+, the new-self is only a physical appearance superimposed on the original self so in essence both are the same shared mind, conscious. Whereas, the body separation in The Substance creates two physical entities that become two competing egos/personalities sharing the same core fluids. This difference leads to the tug of war in The Substance where the balance is disrupted.

There will be Blood, lots of it

Revenge is a blood soaked film where Jen’s character (Matilda Lutz) seeks vengeance for her rape and attempted killing. At the start of the film, Jen and Richard (Kevin Janssens) fly to a harsh desert landscape where Richard is planning a hunting trip with his buddies Stan (Vincent Colombe) and Dimitri (Guillaume Bouchède). Before his buddies arrive, Richard is using the time for a romantic getaway with Jen leaving his wife and family back at home. When Richard goes away for a few hours to arrange paperwork for the hunting trip, Stan rapes Jen. Richard tries to play this violent act down but Jen wants to leave for home immediately. Richard tries to reassure her but instead attempts to kill Jen and thinks he has succeeded. As the saying goes “what doesn’t kill you only makes you stronger”. Jen survives, grows in strength and goes on a bloody violent hunt to eliminate the 3 men.

Despite the oodles of blood sprayed across the screen, Revenge has a music video visual aesthetic where yellow and red palettes pop with a techno track. At times, the interior shots of the film feels like a N.W Refn film taking place in bright daylight while the exterior desert shots echo Mad Max. However, it is clear that Fargeat has her own unique sensibilities as the camera hones in on tiny details and expands them with close-ups or extended sequences where scenes that would normally be depicted in seconds unfold over minutes. The film is more style than substance (pun not intended).

The Substance starts off as a sci-fi body horror film but it ends up united with Revenge in soaking the screen with blood. The slight difference is timing of the blood. In The Substance, blood spurts wildly on the screen only in the final third whereas blood starts flowing liberally in Revenge near the halfway point of the film. In terms of quantity, the sheer non-stop gushing of blood in The Substance more than overtakes the total blood oozed in Revenge.

Mirror Mirror on the Wall

The concept of beauty is prominent in all 3 films and all 3 films feature characters who embody aspects of beauty and are obsessed about with their appearance. Their obsession is emphasized by the usage of mirrors, which are featured prominently in Reality+ and The Substance where the main characters spend plenty of screen time admiring / detesting their physical appearances. In Revenge, the main character Jen doesn’t need to stand in front of a mirror as she is constantly stared at by the three men. The house/villa in the film has plenty of glass windows which give the men plenty of ways to ogle her.

Small World in a Large landscape

Reality+ is set in Paris, The Substance in Los Angeles while Revenge is shot in Morocco but the desert landscape isn’t ever named in the film and could be multiple locations around the world (Mexico is indirectly implied by the beer). Despite the vast landscape of all 3 films, Fargeat's characters go back-forth in between a few locations only. This creates a mini-world for the characters where their entire universe consists of a closed loop allowing them to visit a few familiar spots and coming across only a few people. As a result, the films are stripped of any plot fat and don’t have any unnecessary characters, dialogues or scenarios. However, the thin plot doesn’t translate into a lean running time for the two feature films.

Instead, Revenge (1 hour 48 min) and The Substance (2 hour 21 min) fill their time with eye-popping visual details amped up by loud music and often repeat the same details over and over despite the point being hammered home much earlier. Reality+ is the best of the three films and gets its point across in 22 minutes. The Substance has a wicked trailer but loses steam after repeated sequences before its jaw-dropping squirming final third.

Style over Substance

Reality+ has more substance than style but the opposite is true of the two feature films Revenge and The Substance where the visual style, aesthetic look, mood take precedent over any plot or general themes. There are clear ideas that Coralie Fargeat wants to convey and she is comfortable blending multiple genres to achieve that. Both feature films played at TIFF’s Midnight Madness section (Revenge had its World Premiere in this category at TIFF) which is where one would expect these films although in the case of The Substance, the film managed to get a Cannes Competition slot. That Cannes slot feels in keeping with the film’s core element where the other-self tries to create a life of her own away from original self, so the film tried to carve a life of its own away from a Midnight slot by escaping into the main Competition slot.