Sean Baker is one of the brightest and most original filmmakers of his generation. He rates a place in cinematic history for being the first professional to shoot a feature film on an iPhone. That was Tangerine, which was set in and around a Hollywood donut shop. He is fascinated by people who live and sometimes thrive on the fringes of society, well apart from the mainstream. But he doesn’t judge his characters and challenges us to remain open-minded, too.
Anora which earned him the Palme d’Or at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, opens in the midst of a hectic Brooklyn strip club, where a free-roaming camera follows one of its high-energy dancers (“call me Ani”) played by Mikey Madison. In the course of several minutes we get a taste of her daily routine: playing up to customers, sassing her boss and feuding with fellow artistes. Ani treats her work as a job, like any other, and so does Baker. She just happens to give lap dances for a living.
Then she attracts the attention of a wild, boyish Russian immigrant who wants to hire her exclusively for a full week. Money is no object to this drug-sodden son of an oligarch. His apartment is a showplace, the work of a decorator with an unlimited budget and garish taste. Ani has seemingly hit the jackpot…but her hedonistic liaison with the mercurial Ivan sets off a series of urgent phone calls. It seems there is a hot-blooded Armenian priest whose “other” job it is to keep an eye on Ivan. His employers might not live in the same city, let alone the same country, but he knows he will shoulder the blame after Ivan and Ani get married following a spontaneous flight to Las Vegas in his private plane.
Watching Anora is like riding shotgun alongside a reckless driver. Your adrenaline starts pumping from a combination of fear and excitement; it’s impossible to know what’s going to happen next. That Baker finds a way to maintain the comedic momentum going for more than two hours is pretty impressive, as is his ability to enlist our empathy for his often unlikable leading character. The filmmaker often works with non-actors but refuses to call them amateurs. The term he prefers is “first-timers.”
That euphemism tells you a lot about Sean Baker’s mindset and his approach to each new story he weaves. He is one of a kind, and so is Anora.
