LE MONDE'S OPINION - NOT TO BE MISSED
Everything Hollywood no longer wants to see comes alive in Sean Baker's cinema. His work, already rich in eight feature-length films, makes lucid observations that can no longer be found elsewhere, as American cinema has become sick of its formatting and its political and sexual infantilism. The filmmaker has never ceased to stir up the same obsessions: sex as a bargaining chip and sometimes as the sole means of survival, social class, seen as a destiny that always catches up with you, and finally, money, which structures the world. But if that's all there was to it, the political maturity of his cinema would be nothing without the foundation of his infinitely generous gaze, curious about what his actors (all chosen outside the star system) have to offer.
Anora (Mikey Madison) joins the list of galley heroes who traverse the Baker galaxy. A young prostitute working in Brooklyn, we discover her in a splendid tracking shot where she offers a raunchy dance to a man, all while wearing a smile she has become accustomed to plastering on her face. One night, she entertains Ivan (Mark Eydelshteyn), a young client who happens to be the son of a Russian oligarch. He invites her to his huge villa to pay for her services as an escort and soon becomes attached to the woman who prefers to be called Ani. Without warning, a sincere relationship – albeit paid for – develops and intensifies.
The entire first part, a tunnel of euphoria saturated with acidulous colors, is the painting of two carefree young lovers, handsome as gods, who seem to have dissolved reality and its laws in endless pleasure.
The viewer can't help but notice a lingering ambiguity. It is when Anora works (and earns big) that Anora smiles. All the happiness is both reality and a complete simulation, the story of two people who pretend to belong to the same world and succeed in doing so. Largely aided by sex, alcohol and drugs, they soar and take care to never come down. Their union culminates – where, in the US, everything always has to culminate – in Las Vegas, where, on a very serious whim, Ani and Ivan get married. As the Cinderella of the 21st century, Ani returns to her workplace to bid farewell to her colleagues and her hardship. The only escape promised to these women – beautiful marriage – is now hers.
One morning, Ivan's father's henchmen turn up unannounced to annul the union. And so, all that the first part has patiently built up is cruelly and patiently unraveled by the second. Over the course of more than an hour, the film empties itself of all the euphoria stored up during an interminable hangover: The henchmen embark on a mad dash through Brooklyn and Coney Island to find Ivan and seal the divorce. Standing up to the three henchmen, Ani fights to stay where she belongs – in other words, at the bottom of the heap – not so much for Ivan as for her newly adopted class.
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