The Florida Project, by Sean Baker, with Willem Dafoe

The Florida Project, by Sean Baker, with Willem Dafoe

7 out of 10

This film has been much appreciated

-          It has an astonishing metascore of 92

-          That means that nearly 200 critics thought this work outstanding

I am afraid I disagree.

-          Yes, Willem Dafoe is excellent

-          It is not his Jesus in The Last Temptation of Jesus Christ, but it is a strong performance

Brooklynn Prince and the other children acting in this motion picture are excellent.

Without being a liberal- at least not in the defamatory American sense- I think that children have a hard time on films like this one…

-          Perhaps on any movie

-          First They Killed my Father comes to mind

Moonee is the daughter of an unfit mother, no matter how much she protests when the police come to take her.

There probably is a grain of truth in her accusation that the law has acted carelessly, but Jancey is a failure as parent and not just in that capacity.

In fact, from the very start of this film, this anti-hero becomes a reason to disengage with the narrative, on account of her obnoxious character.

They all live in a rather poor property, where Moonee and her friends spit on the car of their neighbor and then on her daughter.

The woman sees the manager- Bobby aka Dafoe- and they both knock at the door of the smoking Jancey.

She not only smokes in bed, but makes her daughter “benefit” from the advantages of second hand smoking.

She takes the daughter and the other kids she is “supervising” to clean the car, but that becomes an ugly scene.

-          For this viewer anyway

There is a side that we need to sympathize with and if Jancey is far from being the perfect mother, we could use compassion to understand…

-          But it would take a lot of compassion…

I was reading from a book by Tchich Nhat Hanh:

-          He gives the horrible example of an eleven year old raped by pirates

-          After that tragedy, she kills herself

-          But this Buddhist monk speaks about the way he tried to see things from the villain’s point of view:

-          An uneducated boy, living in a destitute family and neighborhood that has no idea about what he is doing…

-          Well, at least that was the process through which this figure of peace arrived at an acceptance…

And Jancey is both a victim and an abuser.

She knocks down and beats a former girlfriend when the latter accuses her of being a sort of prostitute.

Which in a way she is.

Even if this downfall is brought about by very difficult circumstances:

-          Lack of education

-          Need to feed her daughter

-          Lack of training or skills to get any job

-          Being caught while peddling some perfumes on a hotel property…

The bottom line is that I deeply disliked the heroine and her manners, attitude, her throwing a tampon at the window of Bobby’s office.

And the tampon was taken from her underwear…

-          And it was bloody

-          I mean come on!!