How do we react when the illusion of reality shatters in our hands?
In the ending of Anora, the last winner of the prestigious Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival, Sean Baker presents his rawest and quietest closure yet, a standard practice for this filmmaker, who has a talent for portraying the hardships of modern life. Nonetheless, he takes a step back from the ambiguous interpretations he skillfully presented in the last seconds of his previous works. "Life is like a box of chocolates, you never know what you're gonna get," said Sally Field to the audience and her beloved Forrest 30 years ago. However, we also have to be really careful about which chocolate bonbon we choose.
In what could be considered his most "grandiloquent" film, Baker presents two lost people who, in their own ways, choose that precious chocolate bonbon we all search for in this road called life. On the one hand, we have Anora—or Ani, as she likes to be called—played by a savage Mikey Madison. She's a young lady whose past is quite mysterious, but her present may reveal some things about her. Her job as an exotic dancer and how Baker glorifies this labor from the beginning partly reminds me of those 90s movies where everything seemed possible. On the other hand, as Ani's counterpart in her work environment, we have Vanya. He's a spoiled young Russian man who squanders his millionaire parents' money in the United States, only because he can and wants to —and also as a rebellious act against the little attention his parents give him.
When I say that Anora—the movie, not the character, even though Baker probably had the intention to overlap both in one entity—is just dust in the wind, I'm referring to the most essential part of the journey that is sitting for two hours in front of a screen to watch a movie: its experience, which unfolds in two parts. The first part is set in Ani's fantasy, which is to find someone with money to quit her job. Fate places Vanya on her way as the face of her fantasy, and she easily gives in to fill that void that's crying out for something new and innovative. She quits her job, becomes entirely"available" to him and even hugs him while he plays with his PlayStation 5. Together, they get drugged, go to a massage therapist and explore New York with other friends. Life smiles at them fully.
The second part of this experience starts when this lazy nepo baby, who speaks a somewhat odd English, suggests Ani that they marry in Las Vegas, where he has a VIP suite in a casino. But this is all part of a game: he just wants that in order to live in the United States and gain citizenship, because he lives comfortably off his parents' money without doing anything and doesn't want to return to Russia to work at the family business. Is Ani really so innocent as to believe in this love? As from that moment, Anora transforms into a completely different movie. An experience worthy of the Safdie brothers and of a different Sean Baker, one I knew.
The movie navigates both metaphorically and literally through unnecessary corners just to reach a resolution where we end up—partially—getting to know its protagonist. When Vanya's parents discover that their son not only married an American, but also a "prostitute"—I say it like this just to downplay the term used, even though I would rather use the term "sex worker"—that's when the tone changes. The film transforms into a type of hysterical and repetitive road movie, but one that feels more realistic than the first half. Several days after watching the movie, I still wonder: What was Baker's purpose in bringing Anora to life? Was it to humanize sex workers? To demystify the American dream? To immerse us in illusion and then slap us with the truth?
Despite my disappointment, the movie still has many merits. Baker doesn't betray himself by adding unnecessary flair to his story; instead, he relies on improvisation and the surprise that can arise from simply placing a camera on his cinematographer's shoulder and walking around to portray reality, letting everything flow, without fear or shame. Mikey Madison brings to life a character who seems to have everything under control, someone who commands respect, who even answers to her boss with arrogance. The remaining cast feels genuine, not artificial at all. No limits exist for this director, obsessed with portraying unusual stories, but my main problem with Anora was, paradoxically, this: its story.
I simply couldn't buy it. It felt like a remastered version of a Pretty Woman in the TikTok era that, upon crossing paths with an alienated young Prince Charming , loses all her possible decency to live a life full of nothing. No Baker, sorry, I love your raw vision of life, but I can't back you up on this one. Nonetheless, I don't want to spoil anything, but I may have felt something in the ending. I may have slipped out a "ugh, that's too bad, what a pity to have experienced that," but cinema is a mirror. It can be as healing as a therapy session and it can even show us a revealing side of our lives, even without telling us the same story.
Who is Anora? What did she specifically want for her life? What did she end up finding? And if she learned anything at all, what did she learn? I will take these questions with me to the grave, when I am nothing but dust in the wind, like Anora, her movie and all of us are.
Posted on JANUARY 6, 2024, 12:53 PM | UTC-GMT -3
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