'Anora' briefing

3 ½ (out of 4)

            At first brush, Sean Baker did not make a fan out of me. I love a good character you can hate and there few complaints more plebeian than “I can’t relate to this character” when “MAYBE YOU AREN’T SUPPOSED TO.” But in The Florida Project, that perfume-pawning excuse for a mother and her diabolical devil child couldn’t make me care too much, even if Willem Dafoe’s audience insert breaks down a bit. I’ve come around a bit since that 2017 film put Baker on the map in a real way (capitalizing on attention given to 2015’s Tangerine), but it was the next, his last, 2021’s Red Rocket, that spoke to me just as it seemed to place him back into cult obscurity. The horrifically hilarious humdinger about a groomer run amok was his best yet, with another (not so) tragic comeuppance he enjoys parceling out from all vantages and emotional gradients. But Anora is the real deal, Baker’s fringe filmography arriving at its most comfortable crowd pleaser, that Palme d’Or is nice and all… Sean’s features have never come off more visually, cinematically, existentially beautiful, nor have his characters been more uniformly fascinating (the man is one hell of a fearless, pitiless casting director, either intensely empathetic or not at all), his neorealist exploitation of the lives of sex workers never so damn strategically sad and funny. 

After a patterned row of subjects from 2012’s Starlet (porn star) to Tangerine (street prostitute), not to mention The Florida Project (the ex-stripper mom eventually evicted for sex solicitation) and the whole underage push into the porn industry for Red Rocket, this riff on Pretty Woman for film nerds is almost a little tame even if it has many hedonistic hexes to cast. Anora is his most epic feature yet, with gloriously precise editing, particularly in the movie’s mesmerizing, depraved honeymoon of a first act, the bracing blitz immediately met with some tests of patience and audience expectations, of which he has become a soothsayer. Even if you know exactly where Anora is heading, its sordid romanticism has that sweet and sour screwball hijinks that lets him unleash typically Harmony Korine-adjacent (like what if he wasn’t a Waters-wannabe douche) portraits of the “common (wo)man” without getting off to the so-called seedy underbelly of society and WHATNOT.

Mikey Madison (free of any fires lit under her ass) can rightly take this career jumpstart wherever she’s destined for, apparently Sorkin’s Social Network sequel is first up? Unlike say Emma Stone in Poor Things last year, this is that sort of the arthouse erotica / distinguished dirty movie that doesn’t make such a spectacle of it, Baker’s practically unsimulated approach to demystifying sex rendered with far more humanity, intimacy and rewarding comedy than simply taking the piss just about all the time, eh Lanthimos? It’s one of those great warts and all female character studies (of course made by MEN) that spins you round, like A Woman Under the Influence, Safe, To Die For, Tár or even better…. There’s a clear distinction between feminism and fetishism but Baker is quick to discard either, instead choosing to take independent cinema and it’s host of hallmarks to the next level. As he effortlessly staging the necessary improvisational spirit Baker captures some shimmer of the “cultural zeitgeist” (whatever that means) in its sleaziest form with overlapping delivery, inexpensive chaos, jump cuts, non-diagetic music only and family actors (killing his largest role besides Prince of Broadway, as the desperate rich-kid-wrangler Toros, reliable Armenian actor Karren Karagulian appears in all eight of Baker’s pictures, usually as the gold-hearted asshole) .

Baker has everyone’s attention, and the way this movie fucks you fast then slow, then challenges your every expectation move by move, it’s a damn fine, fidgety, many-splendored pleasure, a head-spinning kind of drug-bent love story turned tragicomic crime thriller with flavors of Coen irony and the freedom of French New Wave, yet Sean’s speaking a language all his own. From the indebted takeout cyclist to the shitty Jamaican Dad to the guilt-absolving adult film actress, backstabbing trans prostitutes to Florida’s worst white trash to aging, shameless porn actors/pedos, he has to balance the usual karma or moment of clarity, and Anora’s ingredients amount to something so subtle, strange and startling, made up of feelings you can barely keep up with, which is odd considering none of his former, brutally immediate features were ever allowed to breathe this much. Baker’s such a rascal, I don’t know how he can write and shoot these scenarios and not feel like he’s going to be arrested. And yet his kind of jaunty, Cassavetes-comparable camerawork and casualness keeps everything feeling not so creepy, and Mikey feels like a memorable muse to match Starlet’s fashion model blonde Dree Hemingway.

If this can ride out critical contentment to a Best Picture win I’ll be pleased, this and Oppenheimer could redeem the decade and the actually phony, insincere poorsploitation dreck in Nomadland, not to mention disability checklist bait in the otherwise harmless CODA and of course the exasperating exuberance of Everything Everywhere All At Once and its baffling wacky win has quickly aged like day old dairy. I wouldn’t be surprised if this was too transgressive to make it through to the end and I don’t care. Anora is a celebration of original filmmaking, proving there’s plenty of room between ‘sanitized’ and Showgirls (Baker’s a stable genius next to Paul Verhoeven in ’95) when it comes to sex in movies. Sean simply flexes his still-burgeoning, ever-consistent impulses and Anora inevitably becomes an honorable moment of topping yourself even as you’ve left behind hardly a miss, so long as you can really stand back far and appreciate The Florida Project (and even Tangerine) as the most abrasive of his service industry blues standards. Annie is one of his least deplorable subjects, and far and away the most arresting — she’s wholehearted and hard-skinned, no ditz, just a Jersey girl who bites and kicks, draws that vape pen like a cigarette and ends more than a few sentences with “motherfucker.”

The story structure is so measured and deliberate, the Russian-American affair to remember sold with the peephole-like warped film lens carrying the masterful, manic montages and most desolate passages to similarly kaleidoscopic, precisely absurd movements of blissfully sobering guerrilla filmmaking fireworks. But it’s his opus so far even before you even consider his technical finesse, meaning Anora amounts to a very loud, vibrant movie by a rascally, albeit minor figure on the landscape, until now — man I can’t wait to see what’s next, experience shows it’ll be something to do with making sure those of the world’s oldest profession or thereabouts are taken even LESS for granted. More excavation of unseen transactional truths would be no bad thing, only putting his finest efforts in classic company abreast Nights of Cabiria, Belle du Jour, Street of Shame, maybe even Klute or Leaving Las Vegas, or one of my favorites, Jean-Luc Godard’s divine, stinging, sleek slicer of lifer Vivre sa Vie. Some say the best directors are the ones who make the same movie over and over… Do your thing Sean, please show us more of that euphoric, humbling, effusively entertaining all-you-can-eat Americana for the appropriately empathetic palette.