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Sean Baker's Anora, a love story between an American stripper and a Russian hooligan, has been released in Russia. It won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival and won the hearts of viewers in unfriendly countries from Telluride to San Sebastian.
Anora (Mikey Madison) is about 25 years old and lives with her older sister in Brighton, with whom she has a complicated relationship. Thanks to her grandmother from Uzbekistan, she speaks a few words of Russian and earns money by stripping at night, which often ends with a trip to clients or an hour-long visit to a hotel. One day, during a private dance, Anora meets Vanya (Mark Eidelstein), the generous and cheerful son of a famous Russian tycoon, Nikolai Zakharov (Alexey Serebryakov). A few lines of cocaine, two quickies and a premature ejaculation - and Vanya marries Anora in a 24-hour chapel in Las Vegas. Alas, the tale of how Cinderella acquired a sable fur coat and a diamond ring ends mid-sentence. A joke is a joke, so a private plane with the newlyweds' parents urgently flies from Russia to New York and is immediately canceled. Getting married will save dad money.
Sean Baker's crowd-pleaser, cleverly named after its main character, unexpectedly won the Palme d'Or at the last Cannes Film Festival, and after three years of sad events, the public was tired of geopolitics, the people were ready for debauchery, and they were ready again. I wanted to keep quiet and have fun. The story of a caricatured ghetto beauty who catches a prince in a big black car is an ideal reason to dream and laugh at these strange Russians. They have a broad soul, bottomless wallets, as are their habits and origins. The amount of money in their accounts is mysterious. For example, after a fight, apply "pelmeni" to bruises. However, in addition to Russians, other nationalities appear in this Christmas fairy tale. For example, Armenians carry out orders for a formal nation on Brighton Beach, and we do not know what their "deal" is. The author is not a graduate of the Peoples' Friendship University, but an independent American director, and is in no hurry to delve into ethnic affinity, since in studying textures he did not go beyond the menu of the restaurant "Tatiana". And what difference does it make - Sean Baker can tell, following the character of Viktor Sukhorukov in "Brother 2", who did not see any difference between Bulgarians and Romanians. For him, it is much more important that all the heroes drink vodka, say exotic words in the shower and refute the American dream that happiness is in money.
Sean Baker, who not by chance received an award from the Cannes jury president Greta Gerwig, who grew up with him in the same cinematic sandbox, has been concerned about the little man, a beloved character, and the classics of humanist literature from the very beginning of his career. The same applies to the Soviet film industry, which transformed humanist messages into anti-capitalist ones. The average worker (in a village or a factory), of course, tries to be like a man, but still makes the right choice when faced with moral dilemmas, nobly preferring freedom, equality and brotherhood to the ringing of coins. For Baker, who grew up in New Jersey in the 80s, and not Zastava Ilyicha in the 50s, the proletariat bends not from factory machines, but from the columns of nightclubs. In fact, Anora is not his first film glorifying the difficult path of sex workers. The previous work, <Red Rocket> (2021), told the story of a former porn actor. But the action unfolded against the backdrop of the ruins of a one-story American center, very familiar to the director, and the heroes did not need Google Translate to express their will. Now, in order to condemn the social injustice raging in the homeland he sold to Mammon, the author decided to direct his moving camera to the outskirts of the empire, to escaped zoos and the clowns and acrobats left behind. circus. Surprisingly, the Cannes Film Festival, promoting progressive values, raised the banner of mossy colonial optics through its rhetoric, passing off banal bearded jokes as old songs about important things.
Sean Baker describes the city and world of 2024: "It's loud, drunk, obscene, and oblivious to the civilization around it, or to the feelings of others. Because in the end, when the snow falls and a very sad existential wind blows, only the Russians will take off their last shirts and save everyone and warm them. Doesn't the world remember the quarrels with our grandfathers Andrei Bolkonsky and Alexei Batalov? Or at least Yura Borisov, who explained the beauty of the snowstorms, blizzards, and frosts in "Compartment No. 6" in cloudless 2021? Yura Borisov is also present in "Anora", but he is silent. These days, he can't squeeze anything good out of himself, not even anything good.