A pivotal scene in Sean Baker’s The Florida Project comes near the end of the film. Six-year-old Moonee (Brooklynn Prince) is eating breakfast at an Orlando hotel near the one where she lives with her mother, Halley (Bria Vinaite). Baker presents the little girl in close-up as she samples each item she took from the dining-room buffet and makes some cute comment about it, and he uses jump cuts to skip from one sampling to the next. The scene is subtly jarring, as jump cuts and close-ups haven’t been crucial to the movie’s visual grammar up until this point. With the conclusion only minutes away, it seems a little late for Baker to be introducing new visual ideas into his filmmaking. Yet the sense of starting over feels just right—throughout its duration, The Florida Project seems to be discovering itself, figuring out its structure as it goes along. That Baker would suggest that the picture’s only beginning just when it’s about to end is consistent with his aesthetic project.
Moonee may not understand what the adults around her are angry about, but she’s already picked up on their nastiness. The Florida Project begins, in fact, with Moonee and two friends gleefully spitting on a car at the neighboring motel. When the car’s owner comes out to chastise the children, Moonee curses at her and claims to have done nothing wrong. The kids’ games generally involve making a mess for adults to clean up—in another set piece, they break into their motel’s maintenance room and turn off the electricity for the entire building. Baker composes a marvelous wide shot in which the motel residents come out of their rooms one by one to complain, gradually filling up the frame. It’s worth noting that this congregation of people, like the one that occurs later around the burning condo, is based on mutual grievance.
