TIFF ’17: The Florida Project

***/****
starring Willem Dafoe, Brooklynn Kimberly Prince, Bria Vinaite, Caleb Landry Jones
written by Sean Baker & Chris Bergoch
directed by Sean Baker

by Angelo Muredda “Stay in the future today,” a motel sign ironically beams early in The Florida Project, Sean Baker’s gorgeous, ebullient, and, as the kids say, problematic follow-up to his profile-raising Tangerine. The film is a contemporary fable about a cast of poor people, mostly kids, whose transient lives are lived in Kissimmee, Florida against the looming backdrop of Disney World. Their cheap motel rooms, hosted in a purple monstrosity semi-teasingly named The Magic Castle and negotiated week-to-week at best, serve as a temporary respite from homelessness, their inability to invest in a more permanent future rubbed in their faces daily by the tourists just passing through on their way to somewhere better. Dire as that might seem, Baker turns this downbeat ‘America today’ premise into the stuff of everyday beauty and wonder by lining up his brightly-lit but cool pastel aesthetic with the way his 6-year-old protagonist, Moonee (Brooklynn Kimberly Prince), sees the run-down souvenir shops, ice-cream parlours, and rival motels around her as a kind of raggedy jungle gym.

Baker has spoken of his debt to The Little Rascals‘ focus on kids’ rambunctious antics amidst the Great Depression. He captures something of that contradiction in Moonee’s irrepressible life drive, which propels the camera forward through sad, sideways-glanced vignettes of life in a resort project. He also does well to alternate Moonee’s voraciously-consuming perspective with the slower rhythms of the complex’s sweet, put-upon manager, Bobby (Willem Dafoe), who spends his days gingerly collecting rent, watching things he’d rather not see on security cameras, and waiting for the moment after work when he can lean against a banister in the dark and finally light a cigarette in concert with the real Magic Kingdom’s fireworks, off in the distance like a mean joke. When The Florida Project works, it works beautifully, but one never quite shakes the nagging feeling that this insistence on finding joy and momentary pleasure amidst hopelessness is the province of storytellers more privileged than their precarious subjects–who, after all, don’t get to go home after the fireworks show. A final magic-realist interlude that interrupts one of the most emotionally devastating moments of kid acting (from Prince) is a welcome resolution that hooks back into Baker’s guerrilla-filmmaking instincts of old while staying consistent with the movie’s liminal existence somewhere between reality and fantasy. But it’s also confirmation of those suspicions that even filmmakers with their hearts in the right place, as Baker’s no doubt is, need to tread carefully in other people’s territory. Programme: Special Presentations