THE FLORIDA PROJECT: another small but strong movie from indie filmmaker Sean Baker

I've been following the films of Sean Baker since his 2004 sophomore effort, Take Out (you can find my review and Q&A with the filmmaker here) and finding that work evolving, growing richer and stronger with each new film. Baker has now made six full-length features, with his latest THE FLORIDA PROJECT, the most precious jewel in the crown. Word was out early regarding how special is this movie and, for those who love narrative films with a documentary feel, as all of his films have so far seemed, this one will not disappoint.

Mr. Baker, shown at right, loves children -- both of the small sort, and those who, though they may look like adults -- see Starlet and Tangerine for a couple of examples -- still mostly act like the kids they've never been able to move beyond. How they manage (or don't) to begin to make that move comprises the arc of those two films and their characters' stories. With The Florida Project, Baker gives the actual small kids their lead and lets them run with it. The result is initially bubbly, bracing and enormous fun, but as the movie moves along, its dark side surfaces almost equally. What's missing for most of these kids is not only proper parenting but the kind of safety net any decent society needs. The movie does not "tell" us this; it doesn't need to because it shows us so clearly everything we need to know.

The film takes place in the Orlando, Florida, area -- far enough away but also near enough to Disney World to make that place resonate without our ever actually having to see it (throughout most of the movie, at least). Instead we and our scrappy heroine, Moonee, played by a very young actress, Brooklynn Prince (shown above, center, and below, right), who makes an indelible impression here, hang out at the low-end motel in which the kids and their caretakers live. All the children are terrific and seem as real as kids get, but Ms Prince receives the major screen time, and she's worth every minute of it.

As her problemed mom, newcomer Bria Vinaite (above) is equally real and twice as troubling, as the character stumbles from one bad move to the next and yet keeps caring for her daughter as best she can -- which is, unfortunately, not really very well.

The filmmaker mixes professionals actors with non-pros and does this with such ease that if you did not already recognize performers such as Caleb Landry Jones, Macon Blair and especially Willem Dafoe (shown above, and who is as incredibly fine here, playing what you might call a "normal" character, as he has ever been), you would think them all just part of the real people Baker has recruited for his project.

Baker's choice of incident builds carefully and very well to what will be a turning point. We don't know quite in what direction it will turn, nor whether it will help or hinder, but by then we've spent nearly two breathless hours watching, smiling, wincing, frowning and feeling childhood, its joys and discontents, as strongly as you could want -- and all with characters from an economic/social class of which many of us don't rub up against at all often. When we do, we're likely to somehow discount them. Mr. Baker (as with all his films) makes certain that doesn't happen here.

The Florida Project, from A24 and running 115 minutes, opened on its home ground, Orlando, last weekend and will hit Miami, Fort Lauderdale, Boca Raton and West Palm Beach this Friday, October 20, along with elsewhere throughout the country now and in the weeks to come. To discover the theaters nearest you, simply click here.

Andrei Konchalovsky's unusual view of the Holocaust, PARADISE, opens in theaters

On this past year's shortlist for Best Foreign Language Film, PARADISE, written and directed by noted Russian filmmaker Andrei Konchalovsky, would have seemed pretty much a sure thing for nomination. Except for one factor. While Holocaust-themed, as well as being one of the better of the many movies to tackle this subject over the past decade, the film has a decidedly religious bent. Not a specific religion, mind you, but a clear belief in the existence of god, nonetheless. This may have been enough to prevent its reaching that final nomination.

As good as it is -- and I do mean very good, in terms of movie-making -- for some people, particularly those who do not possess this religious bent, there will hang over Paradise a sense of fantasy that rather goes against the very idea of the reality of the Holocaust. It also makes the horror of it all -- which Mr. Konchalovsky (shown at left) brings home with remarkable specificity, originality and surprising strength and subtlety -- seem somehow acceptable, since, as a number of religions promise us, there will be that afterlife. Yet scene by scene, the movie is riveting and as it goes along, growing powerful enough -- the more we learn about its three main characters -- to make it finally memorable.

Those characters are a middle aged police officer/family man and Vichy collaborator, played by Philippe Duquesne, above, left; a young, blond, very handsome German nobleman, the near-perfect example of Hitler's "super-race" come to fruition (Christian Clauss, below), who, as an SS officer, is assigned to a concentration camp; and an attractive Russian "Countess-by-marriage" (Yuliya Vysotskaya, shown at center two photos below), whose connections to both men slowly come clear. 

As screenwriter, Konchalovsky alternates often intense and richly-handled narratives scenes with straight-up "interviews" with each of these three main characters. The narratives immediately engage us in their plot-enhancing manner, yet the interviews are equally striking, probing and very intelligently written.

We never see the person who is interviewing our three characters, nor do we hear his questions (we initially assume these interview must be taking place post-war, and we also assume it is a male doing the questioning). But the answers the characters give to the questions show us that each is taking the interview quite seriously, even if some of the answers are self-serving. The answers here are also often probing of the interviewee's inner self/motives.

Paradise is beautifully shot in rich black-and-white (by Aleksandr Simonov) with the aspect ratio an old-fashioned 1.37 : 1, which makes it appears that both the narrative scenes and the interviews (a scene of which is shown above) were shot at the same time in which the film takes place.

The horrors of the Holocaust (above and below) are re-created with surprisingly simplicity and force -- without the need for excessive violence. One scene of a guard simply kicking a prisoner stands-in amazingly well for so much we've already viewed of concentration-camp life, while another scene between our naive German officer and the camp commandant he has come to investigate regales us with horrific information handed out in quiet, staid manner than makes it all the more awful.

As the narrative scenes show our characters slowly unraveling, abetted by the interviews, the ironically titled Paradise builds to an awful and a moving conclusion, with children -- as below, and always the future of society -- figuring in a prominent way.

Overall, TrustMovies found the film a remarkable one and extremely well-done, even if, as a non-believer, he cannot countenance Mr. Konchalovsky's overall viewpoint -- which, it must be said, comes more from a Christian belief-in-an-afterlife standpoint, than from a Jewish one. Yet is the film in any way anti-Semitic? No. In fact, it is yet another fine, if flawed, addition to Holocaust cinema. It never questions the reality or importance of the Holocaust, even as it probes cultures, motives and deeds.

From Film Movement and running a long but never slow 132 minutes, Paradise, after playing various festival venues internationally and here in the U.S., opens theatrically tomorrow, Friday, October 6, in New York City at the Lincoln Plaza Cinema; on October 13 at the Cinema Arts Center in Huntington, NY; and on October 20 here in Boca Raton at the Living Room Theaters and in San Francisco at the 4-Star Theater. To view all other playdates for the film, past and present, simply click here and scroll down.

Gilles Deroo/Marianne Pistone's MOUTON serves up a small seaside community via an unusual cinéma vérité narrative

Odd does not begin to describe the 2013 French movie first seen in the USA via the New Directors/New Films series in 2014 but only just now appearing on DVD so that movie buffs across the USA can finally view it. MOUTON (whever I see that word, which is French for sheep, I automatically hear Julia Childs saying it aloud in my mind), written and directed by the filmmaking team of Gilles Deroo and Marianne Pistone, tells the tale of a quiet, strange but sweet 17-year-old young man, who has been given that titular nickname.

Or at least it does this for more than half of the film's 100-minute running time. At that point there occurs a momentous and very nearly unfathomable event, after which the film shifts to the lives of a few of the townspeople who know and/or work with Mouton. We don't see Mouton again, except in a photograph and finally via a letter written to him, which we hear in narration at the finale.

Yes, this is frustrating, to say the least. But oddly enough, it ends up working better than you might imagine. Still, I can't help wondering what the intention of the filmmakers (shown above, with Ms Pistone on the right) actually were.

Surely the pair wanted to give us a full-bodied character in Mouton. And they do, sort of. Though we only get glimpses of the other characters, even after the movie shifts over to them, I am guessing the duo is more interested in capturing the "community" here, a little seaside fishing town called Courseulles-sur-mer.

The filmmakers' style, I think, is something akin to cinéma vérité, which began as a kind of documentary form but soon made its way into narrative, as well. (These two types of cinema were never nearly as "distinct" as we might like to think. Witness the ever-growing list of "hybrid" documentaries, as well as the work of Flaherty, Rogosin and many others.)

With Mouton, Deroo and Pistone don't claim to be making a documentary; they simply use that style to rather complete and full effect. From the opening scene, in which Mouton (played very well by Michael Mormentyn, shown above) is at last given a kind of freedom from his alcoholic, grasping mother to his time working in a restaurant, making friends with the owner and staff and falling into a relationship with a newly hired waitress (below), it all seems as real as life, if occasionally as slow-moving, too.

When the movie changes from its lead character to its supporting ones, this sense of reality never wavers, though one does wonder if the filmmakers mightn't have simply incorporated all this into a more singular narrative that included all the events and also seemed more of a fuller, complete piece. Perhaps they wanted that sense of "loss" we feel once Mouton has left the narrative.

Also, their use of inter-titles to explain what is happening in those final scenes seems a bit of a cheat. (Without the use of one of these -- "Mimi abandons a dog" -- I might not have understood exactly what was going on.) Yet these final scenes do offer some strange and wonderful moments: the twin brothers and the prostitute proves a humdinger combining sexual realism, kindness and need, while the scene that follows, featuring love and obeisance to a very large fish, together with the religious service practiced at the seaside wharf makes it absolutely clear how much this community owes its employment and its very life to the vast ocean and its many species (they could have called the movie Poisson, just as easily as Mouton).

By the end of this singular film, I felt I had indeed experienced the life of the community, it's small pleasures and joys, as well as its losses, chief among these, our sweet-natured (and maybe, yes, a bit slow) titular boy. From IndiePix Films, Mouton makes its DVD debut this coming Tuesday, August 29, for purchase and/or streaming rental via IndiePix Unlimited, the company's (relatively) new streaming service.

One-half of a German lesbian couple pines for a baby in Anne Zohra Berrached's TWO MOTHERS

If only both partners were as eager to have that child mentioned in the headline above, things might have gone differently than they do for the smart and likeable pair of women we meet in TWO MOTHERS (Zwei Mütter), the intelligent, fragmented, but deeply-felt German movie from Anne Zohra Berrached (shown below). Using a documentary style to view her protagonists and their somewhat circumscribed world, Ms Berrached, as director and writer (with some help from Michael Glasauer's script consulting), has come up with a very involving look at a lesbian relationship in the process of growing and perhaps foundering, as one of the two young women finds herself more and more drawn to the idea of having a baby. By any means possible.

Though the film takes place in Germany, a country most of us probably consider relatively progressive (nowhere near the Scandinavian level, however), it seems that -- when it comes to providing lesbian couples state-supported help, financial and/or otherwise -- this country has some learning left to do. The kind of obstacles the couple encounters are surprising -- for one thing fertility clinics that do not, under German law, offer treatment to non-heterosexuals -- and they impact everything from these women's well-being to their pocketbooks.

After exhausting all other avenues, the pair decides to try a sperm donor -- but one who will not insist on being both donor and father. This takes the film into yet further realms of surprise and even a little humor. While the women are played by two fine actresses -- Karina Plachetka (at left, above and below) and Sabine Wolf (at right, above and below) -- the other performers, at least according to what we find on the IMDB, appear to be playing themselves as doctors, donors, and people on the subway and/or street. This certainly adds to the verité quality of the film.

The dialog here seems particularly on the mark -- genuine without ever being "writerly" or overly sophisticated. As much as the movie documents the trials and the time these take before something actually happens, the filmmaker keeps the focus on our two women. This works well because they are at the heart of the drama, and it is their relationship we're rooting for -- at least until it becomes more and more clear that one woman wants what the other does not.

Along the way we meet a number of interesting people who figure into the tale, and as months and more months pass, tension builds and alternatives seems to disappear, while insemination after insemination goes by with nothing to show for them, other than reduced finances. There's a lovely little scene in which Ms Wolf meets, but briefly, an adorable little boy in the library, and we imagine that she may be changing her mind about chil-dren. Finally there's a fellow named Flo who applies as the possible donor, and things take a turn for better or worse, depending on your perspective.

The risks to a relationship when a surrogate is used is shown here to quite believable effect, and while the movie stops short of any actual closure, it is pretty clear where it -- and the relationship -- is headed. Two Mothers, from TLA Releasing under the Canteen Outlaws banner and running a very brief 75 minutes, hit the streets on DVD this past January 13.

Continued & unsettling 9/11 stuff: Eric Stacey's UNTHINKABLE: AN AIRLINE CAPTAIN'S STORY

To find the official version about Marshall Philips, a former airline pilot and 9/11 conspriacy theorist said to have murdered his two children and family dog before comitting suicide, if you Google the name, you'll need to go to Britain's Daily Mail, even though the event in question seems to have occurred in the Santa Barbara area of California. It's the unofficial version that writer/directed Eric Stacey is after in the new narrative-done-in-mostly-documentary-style movie, UNTHINKABLE: AN AIRLINE CAPTAN'S STORY.

No spring chicken, Mr. Stacey (shown at left) has directed half a dozen films over the past decade and written, produced and acted as cinematographer on five of these. He's clearly a hands-on filmmaker whose understanding of and work on both documen-taries and narrative films is put to use on Unthinkable -- but not, I have to say, to very good use. The movie is, first and last, a 9/11-themed conspiracy film, and it seems to me that when one is dealing with this sort of thing, one must go out of his way to dot one's i's and cross one's t's. Not only does this not get done, but there are times as you're watching this movie that you'll feel that the alphabet itself has been left out.

Evidently, from what we can gather from the film, ex-pilot Philips (played by Randall Paul, above) was concerned with the question of where the terrorist pilots of the 9/11 planes got the kind of flight training that would enable them to have done what they did (no easy feat), and further, how this connects to Saudi Arabian intelligence, our own government and the Bush administration.

According to the film, Philips was on the brink of getting (or maybe had just recevied) a photo and/or information that would prove his case. He's frightened for what this might mean to the security of himself and his children (that's Shannon Churchwell as his son, above).

Federal agents (above) pay a call, and later that day (or was it the next?) dad, kids and dog are dead, and the event is immediately declared a murder/suicide. Now, if even a couple of the things shown us in this film are true -- take your choice: it took 18 hours for the police to show up after calls were made to 911 (several of them), the police report got important details wrong, anything but normal proceedure was followed, the bodies were immediately cremated without permission, and on and on -- the whole thing reeks of lies and "cover-up."

Immediately after, dad's reputation is tarred and feathered with every-thing from his being paranoid and abusing drugs to being depressed because of family problems, none of which appears to have been true. The policeman involved (Drew Barrios, above) is so nasty you expect him to start twirling his mustache (except he's bald and clean shaven), while his deputy gives the dead son's schoolmates (below) a demonstration of pro-paganda that George Orwell would have understood but not appreciated.

It seems to me that all this would be fairly easy to document and build a case around. In the movie that case is made by Dad's best friend, a journalist named Madison Feeman (Dennis Fitzpatrick, below) who acts as our guide and hero, once Dad is no more. Also on board is the son of the family's best friend, Mike (played weakly by Shade Streeter) whose scene of biking away from the bad guys is the film's single attempt at action/suspense.

I wonder why all those involved did not simply choose to make a documentary about this case? Facts could have been marshaled and evidence built in a more convincing manner than is done here -- with mediocre writing and acting that moves from the acceptable range into the not so. Whatever the truth behind Philips' claims about the training of those pilots, the death of this man and his children deserve better investigation and memorial.

Unthinkable: An Airline Captain's Story -- from Movies on a Mission and running 85 minutes -- opens this Friday, April 11, in New York City at the Quad Cinema.

FRANCINE: Cassidy/Shatzky's minimal movie stars a very maximal Melissa Leo

I love minimalism -- particularly after, say, putting up with the latest Hollywood blockbuster. (On that note, we tried our luck with Battleship earlier tonight: nothing great, but certainly not as bad as many critics may have led you to believe.) A recent piece of minimal movie-making that works quite well is a film called FRANCINE, which stars the increasingly popular Oscar-winning actress Melissa Leo and comes to us via the film-making team of Brian M. Cassidy and Melanie Shatzky, who often act as writers/directors/ editors/producers (and in the case of Ms Shatzky, as occasional cinematographer).

TrustMovies is not certain that there are not a number of other talented actresses who could bring as much as Ms Leo does to this role. But would they? Would they be willing to hold their vanity to the breaking point and allow themselves to be seen sans makeup, in a nude shower scene, and building a charac-terization of a woman about as sad and sorrowful and maybe even as sick as we have seen for some time. It doesn't matter, however, because Leo, shown above, does a leonine job here, absolutely commanding the screen and our attention and yet giving an utterly un-showy perfor-mance as a middle-aged woman just released from prison (where the movie begins) but barely able to function in the world outside.

Our filmmaking duo (that's Cassidy, top left, and Shatzky at bottom) has a history in the documentary mode, and this becomes clear almost from the first frame. There is plenty of ambient sound, sometime overpowering, but zero exposition (we never learn what the crime was that landed this woman in prison), other than what we can pick up moment to moment from Francine and her life, as she and it move quietly along. "I'm sure you'll do fine," the prison warden says to her as he bids her good-bye. If only.

The movie runs but 74 minutes, including credits, and it feels just about exactly the length it needs to be. While I might have concentrated a little more on the human beings in this woman's life, rather than quite so often on its animal inhabitants, it is clear how important these animals are to Francine's sense of well-being and her need to protect others (the others being animals: much less risky than humans), since she is unable to properly protect herself.

She turns down the genuine overtures of a decent, kind and attractive local man -- nice low-key performance from Keith Leonard (above, right) -- only to be have a bout of self-violating sex with a either a boss or maybe a customer (at this point in the film, she's a waitress) at the local track.  We may get a hint of past history in the way the character responds to a seemingly spontane-ous concert by acid rockers that she encounters, but this is almost akin to guesswork on our part. There's a lesbian tryst along the way, too, but that, like so much else here, Francine is unable to respond to in any kind of normal, socially-responsive manner.

Our girl goes through jobs at the local pet store, lumber yard and veterinary clinic -- where we watch examples of animal spaying (below) and euthanasia -- all the while adding to her menagerie of pets until it's clear that she's incapable of taking care of them or herself. She no longer knows (if she ever did; we don't learn this) how to connect solidly with other people on almost any kind of level, and so she begins to disappear into her "pets."

This is sorrowful, depressing stuff, but as I say you can't look away because Ms Leo is always there and always filling, with utter honesty, the body and soul of Francine -- the woman and the movie. The one positive note: Wherever this film takes place -- it seems like maybe upstate New York -- jobs are certainly easy enough to come by. (Another "if only.")

Francine, a minor gem of realistic character study, coming to us via Washington Square Films and Pigeon Projects and distributed by Factory 25, opens this Wednesday, September 12, in New York City for a week's run at the Museum of Modern Art, with a limited national rollout to follow. And on that note: the film's website might possibly consider updating its Screenings page, and Factory 25 might do the same on its website....

Sean Baker's far too undersung/underseen PRINCE OF BROADWAY comes to DVD

A few years ago Sean Baker made a movie -- Take Out -- that opened up to viewers the world of Chinese illegals working in New York City in the restaurant trade. Now Baker's back with a new film that does something similar for an African emigre who is not only illegal in America but who works in a trade -- the grey market for fashion knock-offs -- that is as illegal as he is. And once again, Mr Baker envelopes us in the lives of characters who seem very real and quite worth our time. And he does this -- glory, glory -- with remarkably few clichés and via camerawork and editing (both done by the filmmaker himself) that are hands-on, up-close, and wonderfully intimate and immediate.

Baker, shown at left, also provides what is one of the best child performances I've ever seen, by a little kid (Aiden Noesi, shown above and below), who surely can't have been more than one or two years old when the film was shot. He shares the role of title character, along with his "maybe" dad, and they're both, in their way, "Princes" of Broadway -- that Manhattan boulevard, around the neighborhood of 27th and 28th Streets, in which the older Prince (played by newcomer Prince Adu, at right, below) plies his trade. The little Prince, sheer delight to view, is a scene-stealer whom Baker has managed to capture without the kid ever seeming to know that the camera exists.

While making use of the filmmaker's documentary-based style, Prince of Broadway offers more of a typical "story" than did Take Out -- three of 'em, actually. The primary one deals with the two princes and how one suddenly comes into the other's life and changes it drastically, as babies will do. The second involves Prince père's boss in the fake-fashion world, an Armenian named Levon (played by Karren Karagulian, below), a surprisingly decent guy with family problems of his own.

The third tale, least important but still catalytic, involves an ex-girlfriend of Prince and her new guy. How these three weave in and out, along with the presence of our hero's current lady -- who proves remarkably warm and helpful, -- considering the state, in one of the film's funniest, grossest scenes, of her boy-friend's bedroom wall.

As well-done, as downright enjoyable as the film is, there is also the sense that we're seeing a bit too much of the "good" side of things. Child-rearing, even under the best of circumstances, is difficult, problematic and sometimes very hard to handle. We get little of that here.

The difficult scenes are so short that they seem to pass more quickly and easily than real-life would allow, and the three main characters -- Prince, his current girlfriend, and Levon -- are shown as a just a shade too good-to-be-true. This hardly halts our enjoyment of the film or of Baker's great skill in capturing the moment, but it does leave us with the sense of a happy ending a little too easily obtained.

Still, the performances are spectacularly good in terms of moment-to-moment reality. According to the end credits, the cast  improvised from the filmmaker's original scenario -- and they did a fine job of it.

Prince of Broadway, released via Flatiron Film Company - New Video Group, made its DVD debut last week and is available now for rental, purchase or download.