For better or for worse
Sean Baker's Golden Palm-winning film Anora is arguably the most enjoyable of the year, by turns funny, sexy, profane.
But a great film? Well let me tell you.
Mikey Madison's Anora's the main reason to watch: she's confident enough that you believe she'd strip for a living, charismatic enough that you'd willingly follow her into the unlikeliest of situations. Mark Eydelshteyn as Vanya is the helium balloon that tugs Anora (and the film) forward, drawing her from one night club to another, to a candy store on the Coney Island boardwalk, to Vanya's sprawling mansion in Brooklyn, to Vegas and a wedding chapel, where he slips a ring onto Anora's finger.
At around halfway point Vanya's Armenian godfather Toros (Karren Kargulian, a longtime Baker collaborator) arrives to try lasso Vanya and yank him back down to earth but Vanya manages to evade Toros and flee, leaving Anora to deal with the consequences; a long unlikely but nevertheless entertaining scene where Anora proves more than a match for Toros and his two henchmen Igor (solemnly gallant Yura Borisov) and Garnick (woozily comic Vach Tovmasyan). Then a moment where all realize that the best way to resolve this impasse is to recover the missing Vanya-- but where?
Call it Waiting for Godot with little of the static staging and some of the existential despair: Anora, Toros, Garick, and Igor spend most of the night wandering the streets of Brooklyn and Manhattan seeking the elusive Vanya; along the way dynamics shift, and Anora and her captors find themselves despite themselves sharing more in common with each other than they do with their husband/godson/employers (you might say this mismatched trio find themselves more in spiritual sympathy with old-fashioned Soviet collectivism than with this newfangled Russian capitalism).
At one point Toros, showing a fuzzy picture of Vanya to a dinerful of young uncaring customers, goes into a rant about the new generation and you feel his exasperation: what's become of these kids? How have they become so self-involved, so calloused? About this time one's sympathy might shift a bit, and we look upon the poor weary man with something not unlike sympathy: the so-called godfather complete with goons has been reduced to being a father, looking at his children with total dismay.
To top things off Vanya's parents arrive: Nikolai (Aleksei Serebryakov) and Galina (Darya Ekamasova), the latter being every bit the firebreathing monster darkly hinted at by Vanya in his rather hushed summation ("my parents are dicks")-- if Melania Trump wore a blonde fright wig I can imagine her calling Vanya to heel, then beg. Nikolai is perhaps the sanest person onscreen-- you feel despite his impassive ruthlessness that he's not unaware of how the world works and where they all truly stand in that world-- so when someone actually earns his barking laugh of approval, the validation is sweeter than any multimillion dollar matrimonial settlement.
Maybe my one complaint about the film and it's a big one (skip the rest of this paragraph if you haven't seen it!) is that I never quite believe Anora could fall for Vanya as thoroughly as she does, and that's important; for Anora's awakening to land with any force you need to believe she could be under Vanya's spell. And Anora feels too smart for that; at least as Madison plays her, she's too experienced, too jaded, too spirited, too much of an independent willful force of nature to totally lose herself in her new husband. If she did lose herself, maybe Vanya should have been less of a wimp and more of a principled idealist, at least at first, or at least long enough to make her believe in him (or make us believe that she could believe in him). If she didn't lose herself then she should have been warier, kept her eyes open for a Toros to walk into their life; she should have been readier to pivot or at least land on her feet. Maybe I'm just too in love with her character to believe she could be such a fool. Maybe I'm the fool, thinking people make smart choices all the time. Maybe. As is the ending, glum as it is, doesn't quite hit as hard, partly because I have trouble believing in the premise, partly because I have trouble not believing in Anora. Heard this being called a tougher grittier rebuke to Pretty Woman and I beg to differ; still feels every bit the fairy tale tho maybe a tad grittier, with a touch of female empowerment served on the side.
But that one major reservation aside-- yes the film is fun; yes I enjoyed myself. One of the better, if not best, films of the year.
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