“Anora”, a cruel and crazy story on the streets of Brooklyn

Anora ***

by Sean Baker

American Film, 2:18am.

Sean Baker, a 53-year-old independent American director, already had seven films under his belt when he was awarded the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival. Anora and he revealed it to the public. Until then reserved for festivals and art house networks, his cinema, which regularly explores the other side of the American dream and capitalist society, nevertheless built a strong reputation among buffs film.

As Four Letter Words Yes Red Rocket passing by Tangerine or The Florida Project, his films (1) are surrounded by marginalized characters – young people from the suburbs, migrants, prostitutes, transsexuals or porn actors whom the filmmaker tries to identify with to renew all humanity.

Anora, of unprecedented breadth, it presents itself as both the synthesis and the culmination of his work. A modern fairy tale that is attractive, funny and extremely lively, which transports us from the slums of Brooklyn to the luxury villa of a Russian oligarch in New York, in the same obscene and vague description of both ends of the series ultraliberal.

kind of Beautiful Woman trashy and contemporary where a prostitute thinks she has found Prince Charming played by the son of a rich family. But only until it ends, the film reveals a political charge and irony that allows us to better measure the gap between precarious workers and global elites.

Movie in three parts

At the very bottom of the scale, there are those sex workers who only have their bodies to live on. Introducing Anora, known as “Ani”, (Mikey Madison), a lap dancer in a sordid club in Brighton Beach. So she can’t believe her luck when she runs into Ivan (Mark Eydelshteyn) one evening. Charged with studying in the United States, this spoiled and immature child of a rich Russian couple lavishly spends his parents’ money on partying.

He becomes smitten with Anora, hires her services as a bodyguard for a week and, at the end of a drunken trip to Las Vegas, marries her without being clear whether he has real feelings for her or whether he is thoughtless work. The young woman wants to believe in her part of the dream. And rebels when Ivan’s parents, fighting against the union, send two shots to solve the problem.

The film is brilliantly constructed in three parts, each of which goes out of the story and gives it its own special color. The first one, full of colorful and sparkling energy, takes us into a cycle of alcohol, sex and drugs that ends with the wedding.

The second, gray and cold, acts as a hangover for the lovebirds when three men, two Armenians and a Russian, suddenly burst into Ivan’s parents’ village to force him to come to his senses. The third is a wild and funny race against time through Brooklyn at night to find the young man, who would rather run away than face the wrath of his parents, on his way to New York in their private jet.

Sean Baker’s talent is to go from one genre to another, from romantic comedy to burlesque, through thriller, with an expected second rate, but without ever losing sight of his subject. Anora may want to believe with all her might in her incredible destiny, but we know from the beginning how far this story is pre-awakened. The filmmaker, however, makes her an admirable heroine, whose undying dignity is equal to the sum of the humiliations and class scorn she is subjected to.

Find in Once upon a time in Hollywoodfrom Quentin TarantinoMikey Madison, his interpreter, explodes the screen. Clever and gullible, free and innocent, terrible and painful, she leads the dance in the nearly two hours and twenty minutes of the film with a disarming nature. A lost young woman, a prisoner of a system that crushes her children and destroys their dreams.

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Sean Baker, independent filmmaker

Sean Baker is an American screenwriter and director born on February 26, 1971 in New York.

A graduate of New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, he will be directing his first film, Four Letter Words, in 2000. Come take out in 2004, The Prince of Broadway in 2006 and Star in 2012.

In 2015, Tangerine he received a jury prize at the Deauville Festival.

In 2017, the Florida Project presented at the Cinematographers’ Fortnight at the Cannes Film Festival.

four years ago, it enters the official competition of the Cannes Film Festival with Red Rocket.

One in 2024, Anora winning the Palme d’Or.