Anora, called Ani, 23 years old, maybe 25, a professional erotic dancer in a strip club in New York, is the protagonist of the latest film by Sean baker. Palme d'Or at this year's Cannes Film Festival, comes after The Florida Project (2017) and Red Rocket (Id., 2021).
Baker frames the world from unconventional angles and his characters are often marginal to society: in The Florida Project the protagonist lived in a mobile home outside the Disneyland grounds without being able to afford entry and continuing to dream of entering Cinderella's castle. This film is no exception and the “comedy” is always bitter, but there is a upgrade, both in the setting – Ani meets Ivan called Vanya, the son of a Russian oligarch and then there is the Brooklyn mansion with a view of the bay and the hotel apartment in Las Vegas with infinite rooms and a bar en suite – both in intent, because here Baker definitively deconstructs the myth of Cinderella and her epigones Holly Golightly and Vivian Ward.
Breaking the myth of the “fairy tale”
Take Pretty Woman, add two parts sex, one part drugs, rubles and dollars to taste, then mix and voilà the Anora cocktail. In Breakfast at Tiffany's and Pretty Woman, it was suggested that the protagonists were prostitutes but not shown much. What did Julia Roberts say to Richard Gere? I want the fairy tale. Baker instead is serious and the treatment is shock: in the first of the three acts of the film he stages the explicit and aseptic sex of the girls in the club, then the one with the young Russian client.
We are light years away from the films of Blake Edwards and Garry Marshall but Baker seems to quote them: the mask over her eyes when Ani wakes up is like Audrey Hepburn's in Breakfast at Tiffany's, and the dress of Ani's colleague-enemy at the club recalls Vivian Ward's in Pretty Woman with the ring on her belly. Even if here the ring is also on the collar, which is very hard-core, and Baker marks the territory, as if to say that in 2024 Ani is more Cabiria than Vivian (the debt to Fellini is declared by the director himself) and the fairy tale is no longer such.
If in The Florida Project the little girl could still dream of Disneyland, albeit on the other side of the wall, here the the castle is no more and in the second act, it's not ours that arrive, but the Russians (in slapstick style). They go to get their son back - complete with a blonde mother who gets off the private plane and like a vulgar virago says that her son doesn't have to apologize to anyone.
Anora's World and the Harsh Reality of the "Modern Fairytale"
The world, in short, is ugly and bad and the rides of Coney Island are certainly not enough to save it, where even Ani and Vanja experience moments of poetic as well as painful light-heartedness. This is because the truth (“we would have been fine together even if I hadn’t had the money” Vanja tells Ani) seems literally buried under layers of makeup and ways of being, doing and loving dictated by the need to (de)monstrate rather than by feeling and by lifestyles led by force of mega SUVs-erotic ballets-money/repeat.
No moralism from Baker but only wise overviews of human nature. And if for a moment the temptation to say "give us back Pretty Woman" is there, perhaps the carriage that becomes a pumpkin again - and the big car a broken-down station wagon of the grandmother - is the only way to dissolve the tears, otherwise destined to remain crystallized forever like the fake and false diamonds that adorn Ani's hair and nails.
In the room
Original title: Again, Production: USA 2024, Direction, screenplay and editing: Sean Baker, Main interpreters: Mikey Madison, Mark Eydelshteyn, Vache Tovmasyan, Karren Karagulian, Yura Borisov.
