Tangerine, Sean Baker’s celebrated 2015 film about a pair of transgender sex workers on a revenge mission in Los Angeles, opens onto a lemony vista, a sea of yellow that slowly comes into focus as the scratched, pitted, Formica diner table where our heroines, Sin-Dee and Alexandra, are sharing a Christmas Eve donut. Color is significant here: Tangerine is set within what is possibly the most disenfranchised population in America—black trans women—but it’s a lighthearted romp of a film, as sunny as the citrus for which it is named.
The Florida Project, which hits theaters later this week, is Baker’s follow-up to Tangerine, and it opens with a similar tactic: a shot of two kids lolling against a concrete wall freshly painted a purple so intense it almost vibrates. It’s the type of backdrop that might, under different circumstances, be catnip for Instagrammers. Here it sets a tone. The Florida Project, a favorite at the Cannes Film Festival, is whimsical, playful, even sometimes laugh out loud funny, but at its core it is deep and dusky and more than a little heartbreaking.
That purple wall belongs to the Magic Castle, a fleabag single room occupancy motel on the seedy outskirts of Orlando where Halley (Bria Vinaite), a twenty-something out-of-work stripper, and Moonee (Brooklynn Prince), her six-year-old daughter, rent a room by the week from the harried-but-kindly property manager Bobby (Willem Dafoe). This is the sprawling, swampy Orlando that Disney World tourists don’t care to see (that much is clear when a pair of clueless honeymooners arrive straight from the airport, and the bride bursts into tears at the thought of spending even a night), but its shabbiness is lost on Moonee. To a child’s eye, the Magic Castle may as well be the Grand Budapest Hotel, its dumpy surroundings a dilapidated Pee Wee’s playhouse—a makeshift amusement park a world away from the actual amusement park on which the city has staked its fate.
The Florida Project is a love letter to a now antiquated idea of childhood—as a time for roaming and mischief making—and to the sort of brilliantly uninhibited, almost absurdist way that kids verbally digest the world. (It’s already been noted that Brooklynn Prince, who plays Moonee with incredible naturalistic facility, deserves an Oscar nomination; that Baker managed to coax remarkable performances from all three of his child actors seems equally noteworthy). Moonee is some cross between Eloise and Huck Finn, feral and foul mouthed, a free ranging wild thing. She and her crew of neighborhood friends wander through parking lots, dart across highways, play in drainage ditches and farmers’ fields, begging, borrowing, and stealing their fun.
The socioeconomic circumstances that account for this lack of supervision are never fully explored, but they are, to some degree, obvious. We presume that Halley, covered in tattoos and with hair dyed pool-water green, is in her early twenties, but she could easily pass for 15. She and her daughter are two peas in a pod (literally: they live in a shoebox of a room and share a bed)—spunky, irreverent, disdainful of authority, unwilling to live by anyone’s rules. On Moonee, it’s cute. On Halley, it means she’s the kind of mother who can’t keep a job, who’s constantly on the lookout for child protective services, who pushes her kid in a stolen shopping cart through six lanes of highway traffic, joyously dodging cars, laughing all the way.
Sex lurks at the edges of this story, but it’s seen from a child’s perspective, refracted and blurry. There’s Moonee’s best friend and downstairs neighbor Scooty (Christopher Rivera), who blurts out vaguely sexual non-sequiturs—to his soft serve: “I’m going to kiss it!”— often enough to remind us that puberty will complicate these easy relationships. There’s the too-friendly old man who loiters near the field where the kids gather until Bobby clocks his presence and sends him flying. He augurs another possible fate: in which Halley loses custody, and Moonee ends up in foster care, nexus of so many stories of sexual abuse. And then there are the men, who register only on the periphery of Moonee’s consciousness, who come in and out of her mother’s room, and who have something to do with Halley’s ability, though perennially unemployed, to cough up the cash each week to keep them off the streets.
Baker is a master of the slow reveal. Every seemingly throwaway moment in this film eventually pays off, and becomes intrinsic to a larger puzzle. ”The Florida Project” refers to Walt Disney’s code name for the massive, secretive series of real estate transactions through which in the 1960s he converted thousands of acres of swampland into Orlando’s Disney World, forever altering the city in the process. Even in Halley and Moonee’s scruffy neck of the woods, the shops are souvenir shops; the businesses cater to vacationers. It’s hard not to see Halley as merely another tourist attraction, another sort of amusement park ride.
Baker has said that The Florida Project emerged from his desire to make a film about the “hidden homeless.” Both this and his last movie focus on people who live on society’s fringes, those for whom the American dream never really existed as anything more than a nice story, an idea as abstracted as the knock-off designer perfume—the scent of the scent of luxury—that Halley and Moonee hock to tourists in the parking lot of a nearby, slightly more upscale hotel. In another scene, Moonee, Scooty, and their friend Jancey (Valeria Cotto) break into a row of abandoned, dilapidated candy-colored buildings, more modest than the empty McMansions blandly emblematic of the burst of the real estate bubble. These concrete cottages are a developer’s misguided concept, beach condos built in a low-lying field, dozens and dozens of miles from the sea. When the kids start a fire that burns out of control, the neighbors gather to watch the units go up in flames. (“This is so much better than TV,” Halley gleefully declares, oblivious to Moonee’s culpability.) You get the sense that what’s burning is the very idea of homeownership itself, some entry level version of respectability well out of reach for residents of places like the Magic Castle, who live hand to mouth, week to week, forced to vacate their carefully decorated rooms once a month so that they can’t claim squatters rights. (“No establishing residency,” is how Bobby puts it, a term of art that’s painfully telling.)
But this paints a dreary picture, and it’s actually the very opposite. Much of the press around Tangerine centered on how it was shot, on a series of iPhones with no budget to speak of; The Florida Project was filmed on 35mm celluloid by cinematographer Alexis Zabe, and it’s lusciously gorgeous, more so than anything I’ve seen in recent memory (with the possible exception of last year’s Moonlight, which also, and maybe not coincidentally, took place in the Sunshine State). Visually, The Florida Project revels in the clash between the gaudily manmade—a gift shop in the shape of a Wizard; a soft serve stand made to resemble a cone—and the high-drama wonder of Central Florida’s natural landscape, rendered in periwinkles, purples, peaches, electric blues, neon greens, a palette tailor-made for a little girl's tastes.
It’s a world as clashingly fluorescent as the Slinky that Moonee plays with in the bathtub, the My Little Pony whose mane she carefully shampoos—her own most magical place on earth. A fallen willow growing sideways is a marvel; the helicopters that take off and land from a parking lot next to the Magic Castle are some ginormous species of native flora; the cattle grazing in a field off the highway, remnant of an older, more rural Orlando, could be wild beasts. The pleasure of The Florida Project is that we lose ourselves in Moonee’s Eden: its aesthetics; its logic (to give you a sense: at one point in my packed screening, a room full of adults guffawed at the joke: “Bobby Boobie”). The discomfort is that, unlike Moonee, we can’t quite forget about the alligators, skulking in the high grass, waiting for their chance.
