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“PLEASE! STOP! SCREAMING!”
Forrest Miller, Conan Neutron, Kristina Oakes and Kt Baldassaro talk with Jacobin film critic and FilmSuck Host Eileen Jones about the first of this year’s Oscar nominees (and eventual winner!) Anora!
This one is part (Russian Oligarch) Family Psycho-Drama, Part Uncut Gems, Part Deeply Emotional Character Study.
Vibrantly chaotic and full of wounded heart. Anora has a cast of well rounded and sometimes hilarious characters that are all just trying to get through their day with the tasks at hands. There is an element of humanism here that is found so wanting in modern filmmaking.
At the center of it is Ani, portrayed by Mikey Madison who stuns in a definitionally star making role. Full of relentless perseverance and wildcat rowdiness but also with a deep emotional center that is always just below the surface. Her work here is absolutely one of our favorite performances of the year (mirrored by the Academy it seems!). Working as a dancer and occasional escort, she’s swept away by Vanya, the Play Boy son of a Russian Oligarch. Who reminds us of like a Russian Timothee Chalamet 😂
They start by forming a pretend relationship, Vanya paying Ani to pretend to be his girlfriend, but she begins to really care about him and see this as their way out.. Vanya from under his parents thumb.. and her from the life of dancing and being an escort.
However, Ani isn’t holding the cards she dreams she is.. and becomes just another (I assume) poor person caught in the tangled web of an Oligarchs Son rebelling against his scary parents.
Ani is lucky that they’ve hired the most incompetent ineffectual security team of all time and Sean Baker is smart to avoid making this into like.. the tragic tale it could easily be, It is tragic, but not in the dark way it easily could be.
When Vanya, whose basically a rowdy child, runs off after marrying Ani and finding out his parents are flying to America to anull the marriage by force… the worlds most hapless security team led by Sean Baker’s favorite character actor Karren Karagulian arrive to try to hold Ani and Vanya there.
The best sequence of the whole movie, has a like twenty minute long Uncut Gems style chase around Brooklyn as Karren Karagulian, his concussed brother Garnick, Armenians, and the Russian Henchman Igor (Yura Borisov) force Ani to retrace all of Vanya’s steps…
From candy stores to clubs to strip clubs to the diner.
I think what feels different about this movie, than all of Sean Baker’s other ones, there isn’t this grounded almost faux-documentarian vibe that he’s almost always gone for.. where he’s like pulling the story from these clearly real elements.
Putting his muse of the moment on stage as like an exaggerated version of themselves, this is definitely not who Mikey Madison is and it’s better for it.
We’ve been a Sean Baker fan for a long time, but this film is both his most conventional (35mm!) but amongst his best. The film evokes, the Cohens, Lubitsch and Howard Hawks among others. This does “big heart” better than most and doing so with a fraction of the budget of other films. The trick with Anora is that it presents working poor tragedy without being the least bit exploitative. Showing an unorthodox fairy tale style love story marked by power dynamics, class and low to mid grade chaos.
We stand by my assessment that the closest analogue to this is probably Nights of Cabiria, but you can also just call it a Cinderella story that ends with the harsh pins for the balloons that our society now comes to expect.
Nobody is coming to save you, there are no easy solutions and almost everybody is lashing out due to sadness and disappointment at their situation. Real or imagined.
The filmmaking is fantastic too. Possibly Baker’s best. Looks like the Academy agreed!