Anora is the eighth feature from American film maker Sean Baker, and won the Palme D’Or for Best Film at Cannes this year.
He moved in from the periphery and into the spotlight with his fifth feature, Tangerine, which was shot entirely on an iPhone, a 5S to be precise, in 2015. But it was his next film, The Florida Project from two years later, that caused the mainstream world to really perk up and take notice.
Baker gravitates towards society’s outsiders, principally anyone working in or on the fringes of the sex trade. But rather then moralize or sentimentalise them, he treats them as what they are, perfectly normal, everyday people who just happen to work in the modern day version of the oldest profession in the world.
Anora is the Christian name of Ani, a Brooklyn based stripper from a Russian language family of emigrants, who hail from somewhere in the east of Europe that, understandably, the film makers refrain from specifying.
She hooks up with Ivan, a gloriously gauche and immature son of a Russian oligarch, and before you know it, they’re an item. At which point the film takes a turn, and we suddenly find ourselves in the screwball come caper world of Lubitsch and Wilder, albeit one with a distinctly modern and garish hue.
There are so many different ways the film could have tripped up and fallen over its own feet, and an obvious comparison would be with the oh so dull Triangle of Sadness (reviewed by me earlier here), but Anora pulls the whole thing off with impressive panache.
It strikes the perfect balance between the demands of conventional farce, where stock characters forlornly pursue their different objects of desire, whilst giving those conventions a genuinely original twist by positing them all against the backdrop of a very believable and contemporary, not to say threatening, setting. Crucially, it all rings gloriously and entirely true.
At over 2 ¼ hours long, they could comfortably have cut that first act by 10 or 15 minutes. You don’t need 30–40 minutes of unbridled and breathless hedonism to understand that, at some point, someone is going to have to pay for all this. But remarkably, the film never flags thereafter.
The reason that Anora works so successfully is thanks to the performances that Baker and his cast combine to conjure up. They all, with the possible exception of Ivan’s mother, manage to elicit not just empathy but actual sympathy. All they are each doing, in their own peculiar way, is trying to deal with the particular hand that they’ve each been dealt. Especially Ani, played by Mikey Madison. Who, it almost goes without saying, is, quite simply, a revelation.
You can see the trailer for Anora here.
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