Editor’s Note: Vanyaland film editor Nick Johnston is back from the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival, but our coverage isn’t over yet! Check out our continuing TIFF 2024 coverage, read our official preview, and revisit our complete archives of prior editions.
Everybody hates a major label debut. Sure, sometimes you get Nevermind, but mostly you get indulgent misfires – the broke-ass dog finally catching the Bentley. When it comes to movies, the move to Hollywood from the indie scene or another country’s cinema is similarly fraught with error, but it’s often understated that there’s a second way to have that grand entrance at the would-be debutante ball. It comes with laurels instead of a proper crown, though – it’s making a film worthy of winning the Palme d’Or at Cannes. This isn’t a rule, of course. Still, there’s a strange thing that happens when a previously anonymous filmmaker presents a work that’s accessible enough for both the evening-wear-clad glitterati, fumbling with their cummerbunds as they stand for an exaggerated ovation to enjoy and for the Cannes Jury to settle on as The Best Of The Fest. As an accolade, the Palme means, more often than not, that you’ve refined your work and style, not necessarily that you’ve done something innovative or extraordinary. You may not have sold out, but you’ve solidified into the filmmaker the public thinks you are. Let me be clear: These are good movies, much like Sean Baker’s Anora is, but they’re usually placed in the middle of a viewer’s ranking of the director’s work. Anora won the Palme this year, and it’s fallen victim to that syndrome.
Baker makes deeply human movies with boundless empathy for the American underclass, though their acidity is often understated. He’s been around Hollywood and the indies for decades now – my dude made Greg the Bunny, after all – but it was with Tangerine that he properly blew up into the forefront of independent cinema discourse. His movies accumulated a fascinating momentum: their distribution widened, and awareness of him grew significantly, but his work never fundamentally changed. Baker took a particular thrill in surprising audiences, be it Tangerine’s iPhone gimmick, The Florida Project’s ending, or, well, the entirety of his masterpiece, Red Rocket, and cherished placing unknown or neglected performers (such as Simon Rex) at the core of his ensembles. Our lead here, Mikey Madison, isn’t exactly an unknown – if you were one of the countless people who saw Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood or the Scream reboot in theaters or tuned into Better Things on FX, you’ve seen her in prominent roles relatively recently. She’s fantastic and melds well with the rich pageant of New York life that Baker’s weaved here, but the problem isn’t so much with her. It’s with what she’s been given compared to his other protagonists.
Ani (Madison) is a stripper working nights at a club in NYC. She’s got an easy and affable personality, a hint of edge, and moves, so she’s pretty goddamn successful at her job, comparatively. When the make-up’s off, and she’s out of her winter coat back home at her sister’s place, her fantasy life at night collapses into the reality of being down and out in Brighton Beach. Loud-ass trains, the shitty and lazy person her sister’s dating taking up the couch and everything else that goes into a normal and deeply boring life like everyone else’s. Ani doesn’t offer too much perspective into her inner life, which is a necessity in a business like this, and Baker’s subtlety here is both a strength and an issue: Madison is so good at the theatrics of the role that the introspection (and internal conflict) is missing. So when she meets Ivan (Mark Eydelshteyn) at the club one night, she’s in top form, called over by her boss to speak with the high-roller, given that she knows some Russian. They initially have a light, business-like flirtation, but after she gives him a dance, Ivan asks her if she does house calls. She does, especially for fat stacks like he’s got.
When she shows up at his mansion in Jersey (private car service, too), it becomes clear that this fucker is loaded. They fuck, he has a great time, and she still remains oddly charmed by this bizarre little character. He’s an apparition of Russian wealth – an oligarch of some kind, surely – but it fades away once she realizes he’s an oligarch’s son. Still, he’s pathetic in a particularly human and endearing way, and hey, he’s got lots of fucking money. After a New Year’s party, he asks her to be his girlfriend for a week for fifteen grand, and the two spend a bunch of time partying alongside other Russian ex-pats and diaspora members before they decamp to the MGM over the strip, with infinity pools that seem to bleed into the Nevada landscape. That’s when Ivan gets a great idea: In bed that night, he tells her he’s gonna marry her. Ani doesn’t believe him at first – she’s heard that bullshit from loads of guys – but he’s serious. They’re in Vegas, right? And if he gets married here, he won’t have to return to Russia with mom and dad. They can have a good time forever and ever, and Ani takes an absurdly short amount of time to say “Yes.” There’s a fat, expensive ring to go with it, too.
This, weirdly enough, is where the movie’s conflict should be, but Ani’s in L-U-V right after they say their vows. He’s an escape hatch from the shitty guys at the club, the shittier dancers she has to work with, and the shitty home life she has with her deadbeat sister. It’s easy as hell to put your eggs in one basket when they’re all you’ve got. The only issue is that I don’t buy this for a fucking second. Ani doesn’t have to be a scheming gold-digger (she ain’t, actually, messing with no’ broke-brokes) or whatnot; she needs reasons to truly trust Ivan if she’s going to go through with this. She doesn’t have any – all she has is faith – and Baker’s attempts to complicate her character and give her depth evaporate by the end. Much like Ivan does when three of his father’s associates show up to make sure that Ivan knows he fucked up and to get the marriage quickly annulled to protect his family’s name back in the Motherland. He runs, screaming, out of his mansion, leaving Ani with these three goons. They’re reasonably nice enough dudes – their leader, Toros (Karren Karagulian), is a family man who gets pulled out of his grandchild’s christening to deal with this; Garnick (Vache Tovmasyan) is a tough-looking guy who gets his nose broken when Ani freaks the fuck out after Ivan splits; and Igor (Mark Eydelshteyn) is quiet, dumb-seeming, and dresses like your typical vatnik.
Few filmmakers on Earth are better at executing third-act calamity and catastrophe than Baker, and he does so again with aplomb, placing us alongside this bizarre foursome as they attempt to track Ivan across Brooklyn. Ani’s their unwilling captive, but they’re also her unwilling captors, forced by circumstance and community to do shit like this to get by. What unites them is that they all become histrionic morons in situations that are stressful, aside from the hyper-stoic Igor, who looks like he’s a few bottles short of a crate of Stoli. But much like Igor, each one of these people is more than meets the eye, and they’re also placed in the most ludicrous of situations. They get into jam after jam as they make their way around the Borough – some they cause (they smash up a candy store on the boardwalk run by some of Ivan’s friends), others they merely react to (Toros’ reaction to getting his car towed is genuinely a great bit) – evoking Scorsese’s After Hours in how effortlessly-seeming Baker captures the logic governing all the chaos. I mean that in both the physical sense – his staging and camera placement are as impeccable as always – and in the mental sense – everything feels fitting about these characters’ actions.
Then the final scenes come around, and you get the moments that made me think of Anora as Baker’s real “major label debut.” He’s fantastic at endings, normally, ones deeply rooted in a given character (or characters’) perspective – think of the Disney World bit at the end of The Florida Project and how crushing its revelation is, or the fantasy awaiting Mikey Saber after a night of just-desserts on the mean streets of small-town Texas, reversed “Bye Bye Bye” just driving home its unreal nature – but he ends this film in a series of good-looking stabs at profundity that fails the film’s set-up as well as its characters. We never get close enough to Ani to buy where she ends up, but it would betray his ethos as a filmmaker if he went a more obvious route with how he presents her desires or intentions. Baker’s ensemble spends much of their screen time in groups or other crowds of people, and the moments that are make-or-break for his other movies involve true intimacy: Red Rocket would not be a masterpiece without the one or two minutes Mikey spends in sadness, reflecting on the genuinely evil shit he’s done before he doubles-down on the shit that fucked him up in the first place. There’s nothing like this here.
What remains, in essence, is a Baker film that features all the things people cite in conversation about his work: his focus on sex workers and those marginalized by their association with it as a business, his ability to create the wackiest third-act adventures possible, the rigorousness of his plotting, the strength of his actors, the quality of his humor and his visuals. These attributes are all correctly identified as his “trademarks,” but the messier nature of his prior films was in part because they were provocative. They may not have been surprising at a certain point, but they were always unexpected and thrilling in how they unfolded. Anora, on the other hand, is Sean Baker’s “most accessible movie yet,” the entry point for new viewers to get acquainted with his style and all of the faint praise critics damn otherwise solid movies like this with because we’re too afraid to admit that this is Baker at his least interesting. He’d been operating at a “Diablo” level for years, and now he’s made a “Mild” for those who can’t handle too much heat on their crunchwrap. This comparison isn’t a dig – a crunch wrap is a delightful thing — but that flavor provides a kick that can’t be quantified outside of an ingredients list. Or, well, an industrial chemicals list.