OFFICIAL SELECTION – IN COMPETITION
He is – or rather was – a good-looking kid; he expresses himself well, in front of people who have difficulty in constructing a sentence; he barely conceals his will to exploit for his own profit the weaknesses of some, the poor wealth of others; he seems to be coated with a non-stick film, he laughs at insults and takes the blows, getting up after each misstep to go and do the evil a little further. But Red rocket Even though its story unfolds during the few weeks that separated the conventions of the two major American parties from the 2016 presidential election, its protagonist is not Donald Trump.
His name is not Mikey Saber either. But it is by this porn star name that the people of his native Texas City now know him. Twenty years earlier, he left this small refinery-dominated town on the shores of the Gulf of Mexico to make his fortune in Los Angeles with his wife, Lexi. There he became famous, collecting the AVN trophies, which are to porn video what the Oscars are to movies. And then his luck changed and, when Sean Baker’s film begins, Mikey Saber returns to Texas City with, for all heritage, a T-shirt, jeans and the firm intention of bamboozling everyone.
Sean Baker, who made his debut in Cannes competition, launches this sad sire in a picaresque comedy with ridiculous stakes, carried by the astonishing performance of Simon Rex
In this landscape of tropical swamp where oil has defeated the mangroves, the director Sean Baker, who is making his debut in the Cannes competition, launches this sad sire in a picaresque comedy with ridiculous stakes (we are talking here in hundreds of dollars), scope by the astonishing performance of Simon Rex, until now a secondary actor, whose CV indicates some forays into the porn industry.
It could be unbearable if we did not find here the intense empathy shown by the director of Tangerine (2015) and The Florida Project (2017) with regard to his characters and his prodigious talent for filming these spaces that no one wants to look at when we cross them. After the fast-food parking lots in Los Angeles, the decrepit motels of Orlando, here are the miserable pavilions of Texas City, transfigured by the looks that Baker and his director of photography, Drew Daniels, pose on these moth-eaten lawns, those rows of shops with puzzling signs (taxidermy supplies? In Texas City?).
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