Walt Disney World in Florida, the most-visited tourist resort on the planet, began life as a planned community, the futurist brainchild of Walt Disney. Ultimately this never really came to pass, with Walt’s “Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow” (EPCOT) turning into nothing more than a futurist-styled theme park similar to Disney World and Disneyland, themselves. All of this is background to Sean Baker’s The Florida Project, an exploration of the day-to-day experiences of those living in the margins just outside of Disney World. Halley, recently unemployed and basically hustling for a living, and her young daughter Moonie are “hidden homeless”, existing within a down-at-heel motel designed to accommodate tourists on lower budgets. To avoid the legal complications that come with any tenant establishing permanent residency, Halley and Moonie are required to vacate the motel once a month, meaning that legally they don’t reside in the hotel but have made a series of several-week stays.
Our viewpoint character here is Moonie, on her Summer holidays from school in the time period covered, and allowed to mostly roam free along with her friends Jancey and Scooty. These are not quite the feral children of, say, Terry Gilliam’s Tideland, for they have (single, struggling) parents, a roof over their heads most of the time, and food to eat; but they also receive minimal parental oversight, and their days are taken up with petty vandalism, panhandling, and other misdemeanours. If anything, the central authority figure in these children’s lives is the motel manager, Bobby, played by Willem Dafoe with the patience of a saint – he may actually call to mind his portrayal of the Christ two decades earlier. “You’re not my father!” protests Halley at one point, and “No, and I don’t want to be,” he replies; but he is, and Halley is more a child than her own daughter. And so, whether Bobby is chasing a probable pædophile away from the children, protecting Halley from an angry client/mark, or just playing along with the kids’ nonsense, he’s a warm exemplar of paternal authority. Yet it is Brooklynn Kimberly Prince, 6 years old at the time of shooting, who out of the whole cast truly shines, managing to convey an entire private universe within Moonie, who for the most part exists in a world of wonder and enchantment that is drastically removed from the harsh realities of how her mother must live.
A long way from the gritty, iPhone-shot look of Sean Baker’s previous film Tangerine, cinematographer Alexis Zabé here provides sun-soaked atmospherics and pastel-coloured architecture, bringing to life the extraordinary vividness of the world as seen through a child’s eyes, in its own way just as magical as anything packaged by Disney. But, as with Sean Baker’s Tangerine, Anora and others, it is not his approach to romanticise, or even to celebrate these characters. In plenty of scenes, they’re plain unlikeable, and indeed Halley’s constant antagonism to pretty much anyone other than her daughter slowly alienates her from all those around her, sealing off what few opportunities in life she does have. But this unsentimental approach makes the rare moments of emotional catharsis all the more credible, and despite Anora‘s Best Picture win, Baker’s portraiture of the marginalised, the poor, the sex worker, has never been more engrossing nor as powerful as here. Baker has frequently cast non-actors and coaxed terrific performances from them, but the work of Prince and his direction of the young talent is nothing short of miraculous. She even gives Frankie Corio in Aftersun a run for her money, not to mention that she was half the age here that Corio was.
For such an unassuming – if magnificent – film, Second Sight have put together one of the most dauntingly enormous sets of extras of any film in their catalogue, requiring an entire second disc in addition to the extras featured on the first disc. These include interviews with Sean Baker (“Success Sory”), Willem Dafoe (“Playing Within the Frame”), Bria Vinaite (“A Transformative Experience”); a collective interview with the three main child actors, now teenagers since Florida Project is eight years old now (“The Kids”); individual interviews with each of those three – Brooklynn Kimberly Prince (“Origin Story”), Valeria Cotto (“True Friendship”) and Christopher Rivera (“Overusing Freedom”) – and, from the crew, co-writer Chris Bergoch (“Embrace the Chaos”), producer Andrew Duncan (“Clearing the Brush”), producers Kevin Chinoy and Francesca Silvestri (“A Different Way of Shooting”), associate producer Samantha Quan (“A Sense of Imagination”), casting co-ordinator Patti Wiley (“Streets of 192”) and, more unusually, an interview with the Reverend Mary Downey, executive director of the charitable Community Hope Center. How often have you seen that kind of social consciousness from a Blu-Ray special feature? Also of interest is “Back to the Castle”, in which the now-teenaged “Florida Project kids” provide a tour of the film’s key locations today – those of them that remain.
Those aside, there is “Under the Rainbow”, which is a short but fascinating behind-the-scenes, with the highlights mostly being those parts which highlight Baker’s direction of his actors and especially his child actors. A short video essay, “Wretched Splendour”, by Rohan Spong, goes into some detail about the film’s marvellous cinematography, and also included are archival interviews from the time of the film’s release, and a set of bloopers.
There are also two commentaries; the first is a detail-filled yet curiously dull track with Baker, co-writer Chris Bergoch, and cinematographer Alexis Zabé joining remotely; the best tidbit learned here is that Britney Spears, Miley Cyrus, Selena Gomez, Ariana Grande and Zendaya were all considered for the Halley rôle that ultimately went to yet another non-actor, Instagrammer Bria Vinaite. Any of these names would likely have done just fine, but it’s a mark of Vinaite’s perfect understanding of the character that it is difficult to imagine anyone else playing the part. The second commentary is with Kat Ellinger and Martyn Conterio, who provide an earnest yet repetitive discussion of poverty: poverty in film, poverty in The Florida project, poverty in real life.