“Sean Baker follows his 2015 breakout feature Tangerine with another high-energy movie about people whose imaginations are undaunted by living on the margins,” begins Amy Taubin, introducing her interview with the director for Film Comment. “In The Florida Project, six-year-old Moonee (remarkably expressive Brooklynn Prince) and her two best friends spend the summer running wild on the grounds of the Magic Castle, a week-by-week motel just a mile away from Florida’s Disney World. For these children, overgrown weeds, deserted houses, and nearby posh hotels spell adventure, and seen through their eyes and the lenses of Alexis Zabe’s 35mm camera, theirs is a lushly tropical, dazzlingly colorful world.”
“But, of course, life at the motel isn’t a simple tale of pre-adolescent crassness, pastel walls, and whimsy,” writes Cassie da Costa, also for Film Comment. Moonee’s mother, Halley (Bria Vinaite), “skillfully alternates between chilling and hustling, and enlists Moonee as an accomplice in selling marked-up wholesale perfume in front of a fancy hotel. Later, she must resort to riskier measures to make rent.” As noted in the round of reviews that followed The Florida Project’s premiere in this year’s Directors’ Fortnight at Cannes, reviews have been overwhelmingly positive, but da Costa dissents: “Baker crudely renders his marginalized subjects because while he can imagine their daily realities he cannot fully fathom their inner lives. Jacques Audiard makes this mistake in Rust and Bone, Andrea Arnold in American Honey, and John Lee Hancock in The Blind Side.”
Noel Murray, writing for The Week, disagrees: “Baker's film is one of the year's best . . . An inspired mix of Little Rascals hijinks and neorealist art, The Florida Project is clear-eyed about how bad choices (or lack of choices) can condemn some folks to living on the margins. But the movie's also funny, lively, empathetic. Yes, it's a critique of the inadequacies of American consumer culture—tellingly set just outside the Disney resorts. But it also argues emphatically that all kinds of people are worth preserving, even in places that may strike us as tawdry and squalid.”
“Studded with kitschy capitalist detritus (fast-food domes shaped like giant oranges or mermaids) and graced with flashes of detailed yet ephemeral beauty (a fireworks display at night, a pair of children approaching a bovine herd amid tall grass), Baker’s film overflows with euphoria and sadness,” writes Fernando F. Croce in the Notebook.
“Moonee romps around the ‘neighborhood’ (really just a motel-dotted track of interstate) with her little pals, Scooty (Christopher Rivera) and Jancey (Valeria Cotto), getting into trouble wherever they can, while motel manager Bobby (Willem Dafoe) plays the Mr. Wilson to their collective Dennis the Menace,” writes April Wolfe for the Village Voice.
“Willem Dafoe's performance as Bobby . . . is so humble that it's hard to believe the guy's been a superstar for several decades,” writes Cosmo Bjorkenheim at Screen Slate. “Bobby receives orders from a significantly younger boss, takes shit from the housing complex's every resident, and clears out disgusting, vacated apartments without ever even kicking a wall in frustration.”
Dafoe’s Bobby “is one of his gentlest characters, though even here we pick up traces of pain in his past,” writes Anthony Lane in the New Yorker, “and one glorious shot of him, drawing on a cigarette and gazing out at the bruise-colored dusk, suggests a weariness to match that of the other residents. That is why he indulges Moonee, as she plays hide-and-seek in his office—not because she’s cute (Brooklynn Prince is too brazen for that) but because the rebel in her finds no reason, as yet, to be quashed by experience. Her time, like his, will come.”
VIDEO
“Ambling through this exemplary microcosm of today’s America is such a rich, slyly instructive experience,” writes James Lattimer for Cinema Scope, “that some of the wonder is invariably lost when both Halley and Moonee’s actions start overstepping the mark and a relentless downward spiral kicks in, with the pair soon hurtling towards a horrifically plausible heart of darkness so rapidly that the scenery around them becomes a mere blur.”
“What initially appears to be a ‘Celebration!’ of amorphous youth reveals itself as a pastel-colored horror flick (a feeling further intensified by the ultra-saturated 35mm cinematography of Alexis Zabe, who shot two Carlos Reygadas provocations, Silent Light and Post Tenebras Lux) about the easily discarded American poor,” writes Keith Uhlich.
“One pointedly dreamlike episode right at the end shows us both the wonder that these children, living in the shadow of Disney’s Magic Kingdom, have missed out on, as well as the sense of togetherness they’ve achieved on their own,” notes Bilge Ebiri in the Village Voice.
Slant’s Ed Gonzalez: “Baker and co-writer Chris Bergoch understand the pull of Disney on young lives and they posit the Magic Castle as a temporary place, whose upkeep feels like a hard, desperate means to keep a dream alive for the young: a pit stop on the way to hanging out with Mickey Mouse. A bitter irony here is that, when the shit hits the fan and Moonee’s eyes open in ways they never have before, she makes a heartbreaking, last-ditch effort to run toward that dream, fulfilling something that her mother could never give her. But I’d like to think, given this girl’s precociousness, that she’s also hellbent on destroying this dream, if only to dream bigger: of a world not so small, after all, and as such not predicated on the self-containment that enables capitalism and turns us into its suckers.”
For Melissa Anderson at 4Columns, “The Florida Project bears out Lillian Gish’s maxim in Charles Laughton’s The Night of the Hunter (1955), another great film about tyke resilience that plays at the NYFF as part of its Robert Mitchum retrospective: ‘Children are man at his strongest. They abide.’”
More from Jason Bailey (Flavorwire), Dustin Chang (ScreenAnarchy), Lawrence Garcia (In Review Online), David Noh (Film Journal International), Mike Ryan (Uproxx), Brian Tallerico (RogerEbert.com), and E. Oliver Whitney (ScreenCrush).
Hugh Hart (WhereToWatch) and Matt Prigge (Filmmaker) interview Baker, while Gregory Ellwood (Playlist) and Joshua Rothkopf (Time Out) talk with Dafoe.
VIDEO
NYFF 2017 Index. For news and items of interest throughout the day, every day, follow @CriterionDaily.
from The Criterion Current http://ift.tt/2xUaQjG
Nessun commento:
Posta un commento