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 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.
6 comments:
I've been pondering the way Ani falls for Vanya because it bothered me, too, albeit not to the extent that I'd identify it as a MAJOR reservation. I think the key is his apparently bottomless well of youthful, puppy dog-like energy. She has presumably been careful and watchful every second of her life; could the way he impulsively does whatever he pops into his head be the thing that lulls her into complacency? According to this reading, with her American upbringing she tragically misreads the fact that his parents have obviously indulged the child as a sign that they will also accept the decisions of the young adult he has grown up to be.
Interesting. I'd go simpler and consider Anora as canny as myself and I guessed how the family would really react, and how Vanya would respond.
That said, I was not always American, and I do know something of how rich families work.
Here's my question (and *it* is a question--I'm not necessarily trying to convince you of anything, but rather just throwing out ideas!): is knowing rich PEOPLE the same as knowing rich FAMILIES for the purpose of this exercise? We know that Ani runs into plenty of the former at work, but from the brief glimpses we see of her interactions with them it seems like most of them come to Headquarters to escape from their spouses, mothers-in-law (I'm pulling from another film directed by Sean Baker here, TANGERINE, because I could maybe see Kitana Kiki Rodriguez's Sin-Dee falling into the same trap) for awhile. Now here comes Vanya who appears to be there because that's exactly where he wants to be, and who can go wherever else he wants to go and do whatever he wants to do there without an apparent care in the world. Now, to be sure, Ani has to miss or ignore signs to the contrary for this illusion to be complete. But look how wiling she is to believe that he's a drug or gun dealer or that he invented an app: she has a limited vocabulary of explanations for his wealth, and the category he falls into is "independent rich person" So, okay, his parents are "dicks," but they gave him a house, a plane, an extremely generous allowance. They gave him freedom. Or so she chooses to believe. She realizes pretty early on that it may have been a losing bet, and that to me is what this film is about. She IS "too smart" to have made a mistake like this and she knows it and she's embarrassed, but she's also doing the math the entire time and the payoff is so high that it still seems to her that her best play is to see it through to the bitter end and maybe try to influence the outcome.
Anora at this point is acting out of pride. I think the smarter play was to take the ten thousand the moment it was offered. All this was her being hurt by the idea Vanya never meant it.
Less dramatic, but we could go the other way, only I don't feel Baker prepared us for that other more dramatic way.
Smarter and more dignified. She'd come across as a smart operator who wasn't fooled for a minute.
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