Anora Movie by Sean Baker, Palme d'Or at the 77 Cannes Film Festival, is in all Italian theaters from November 7, 2024, and distributed by Neon.
Criticizing Anora means defining some demands addressed to those who write and those who read: it means abandoning the coordinates of a cinema that levels itself through the theme; completely extinguishing the visual paradigms that must not overlap with the aesthetic metaphor of the grotesque. Sean Baker is fundamentally an independent director even though his conversion, in line with a mainstream dimension, has not stressed the nature of an asymmetric, circumscribed, dispersive narration.
Capturing the dramaturgical concreteness of various and hypothetical ironies, intelligently written and expressed, simplifies the focus of the image intended as a prohibitive lens to which a filmmaker of the genre relies. Obstruction and destruction of a lymphatic and sequential cinematographic archetype.
The premise for an analysis that can guarantee curiosity about a completely autonomous plot is the break between elite cinema and that insolence – justified – properly from a niche of aesthetic experts of a cinema with perpetual hiccups.
Anora: the merit of a narrative defect
Anora possesses multiple creative decodings placed before a cinematographic process that is perceptible at the same time as the vision. Entering a dimension of moral apocalypse, frozen by the inconsistency of a dream that bursts in and crumbles in a greedy and sadistic subtitle.
A deformed story that dethrones the fairy-tale myth, breaking the princely inclinations predisposed by a social program. The evolution of Anora goes beyond expectations within a set that recreates itself by weaving humor, sarcasm and sincerity. Raw sincerity. And it pleases!
In vivo: the story of Anora, a sex worker (Mikey Madison) and Ivan (Mark Eidelstein), a rich boy of Russian origin, a political condition equal to a contemporary ensemble and media agreements. The couple that rubs all the empirical annoyances breathing the obsession towards new paradoxical and contrary supremacies compared to a classic temporal.
The script of the film is to sabotage the parodic idea between one part and another part, imposing itself on a visual context that requires only this exclusive cinematographic cycle and no other.
Anora for everyone, Ani for others
Anora is a girl about whom there is little to discuss, there is no need to comment on her existential stature, who moves in the incorrectness of the claim of a society that is realized, compared to an apparently correct experience according to the dynamics that do not vary between film fiction and reality.
Therefore, starting again, Anora is a sex worker, her talent is the exposure that animates the iconic faces of idiots of a huge city; the usual over-the-age attraction seekers in search of new moods and flavors for a fee and at all costs. The sequel to a metropolitan prophecy that takes up the girls of Coyote Ugly and rekindles or embitters at the moment of meeting.
Everything is in line with the proposed cinematic genre until the perspective frames a boy, thin and completely unsuitable for the role we imagined he would play.
Anora was surprised by this. There is nothing that can guarantee the sensation of a remake of the genre we are often forced to. And yet, the intrigue between the two - Ivan and Ani - who do not know how to communicate except physically, defines a new filmic zone, an emergency exit from two different lives but subjected to the demands of despots and pimps: the exact same thing.
In Anora the existential peripheries are the center of the story
Sean Baker is a popularizer of an iconoclastic environment despised by the citizen who believes he can live in the open compared to or more than others. If in Tangerine (2015) the trash retrospective meets the cultural spectrum buried by concrete and splendid signs of America that never goes out, Anora reworks a hypothetical ambition considering the constraint of a change presumptuous and specious.
The fairy tale of the girl who comes out of the "periphery" of her existence is not revealed in the veins of the film. First of all, the importance of the title in our language. The word prostitute repeated so many times to be a single script, brings us back to the derogatory meaning with which we use it. And yet, the offense does not become a cliché, it never does, it remains the direct corridor to the explanatory meaning of the director.
Prostitution is a profession that does not have to teach anything to anyone, that "rose mouth" in the mouths of others continues to clash. The cracking of beliefs is the most redundant element in Sean Baker's cinema. His descriptive and hermetic flair manages to harmonize, in an intimate process, the viewer.
The bloodthirsty soul that vanishes, the imperceptible violence, and the exclusion of roles, in Anora define the ethical greatness of artistic authorship. Phase two of a decidedly divided and divisive film rises in tone but falls asleep through the adventure of a couple who slowly begin to understand each other.
The sex worker and the young Russian will not be disturbed by the fantasy of a probability of understanding but only by a henchman who does not raise his hands but mistreats; yet another dig at a combative cinema in times of real war.
Anora: evaluation and conclusion
Sean Baker's Anora is indeed the winner of the Palme d'Or at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival, but it is above all the surprise of a victory of a genre with an aesthetically perfect project for the cinephile's streaming platform. Anora’s expression is strengthened in its structure that rises by discarding the others. Scraps, well assembled, lead to the anthropological peak of a commercial but experimental film, completing the triad with Tangerine and The Florida project (2017).
Invoking the drama of Whore (1991) and Tokyo Decadence (1992) but with the elimination of the thriller’s suspended adiposities, streamlining the inquisitorial complexity of the theme, granting an ironically modern vision compared to the title’s recruitment defined through the consensual crucifixion of the great “collective judge”.
Sean Baker is the master of cryptic sympathy. In Anora the natural instinct of the independent without a desk but with the promotion of the month, raiding the drawer of the ignorant, the perverse and the instructor of mannerism.
Anora, distributed by Neon, winner of the Palme d’Or at the 77th edition of the Cannes Film Festival, will be in theaters from November 7, 2024.