Review of The Florida Project (2017) by Mario C — 28 Mar 2018

You were Gill in Finding Nemo and couldn't get Disney onboard?

THE FLORIDA PROJECT.

After Tangerine, I would expect nothing less from Sean Baker and his emotional rawness painted in techiclolor. That film gained much attention for being shot on a iPhone proving alongside many other films that means does not make quality, the filmmaker's eye prevails. Often independent filmmaking is about overcoming obstacles and having lowest budgets forces a director to be much more creative, almost as if the sweat that she or he has put into the film comes through the screen. That's why many filmmakers who take a leap between a small budget and a big one tend to overshoot and lose their creative power. Even with a greater budget, Baker has managed to keep his essence, fine-tuning it even to the greatest extent of his point of evolution as an artist. By no means this is a perfect movie, but it's certainly one of the year's most distinct and captivating. Baker tells a heart-braking story from the point of view of the children in the movie, specially Moonee whose relationship with her mother is, as far as privileged people are concerned, a functional chaos. And although Baker is never judgemental of the people he portrays, he visibly shows the transposition of her mom's characteristics to the child to the point that we know that Moonee will eventually become her mother and that her mother was once Mooney. He takes these white-trash-American adults and sets them against a background of vivid pink, as never deserving of judgement by the children who are around them. Willem Dafoe is brilliant because he represents the outside look into those lives and the adult who is the moral saviour. The film ends with a crucial decision not from the characters but from the director who decides to shoot the ending he wants with an iPhone to go around the fact that he has no permission to film in the Eden of those children. I do get the immensely important thematic ending but I personally think that the ending doesn't pay off and it's ultimately a too stylistic different sequence from the rest of the movie which is so well-paced and gorgeously audacious.