38/34
Narrative
Anora, a young sex worker from Brooklyn, meets the son of an oligarch and spontaneously marries him
When the news reaches Russia, their fairy tale is threatened, and his parents go to New York to annul the marriage. … IMDb editor Arno Kazarian offers brief reviews of 12 films he screened at the 2024 New York Film Festival, including Honora and the dangerous, strangely erotic film Misericordia.
Quote from the book “Close-up: Anora” (2024)
… At the press conference of the Cannes Film Festival, Mikey Madison said that director Sean Baker will act out various sexual positions with his wife, producer Samantha Kwan, to show the actors what he wants from them.
Unpredictability can be a wonderful cinematic tool, and great people can sometimes wield it like a magic wand
But the flow of the film also matters, and although Sean Baker’s latest film “Anora” does have sharp plot twists, it’s the confusing lack of a single coherent vision that turns this ride into a car crash. The first half is more dramatic and is devoted to the relationship between two dissimilar characters: the cunning stripper Mikey Madison and the spoiled rich boy Mark Eidelstein.
In the end, something goes wrong, and the film turns into an unfunny “Three Stooges” series, which is greeted like a pile of crap in a swimming pool
(Seamlessly blending genres for maximum satisfaction is not this film’s forte.) Not that Baker’s stereotypical direction was anything special to begin with (as was its unnatural and unwelcome bleak finale), but with such gems as The Tangerine and “The Florida Project.” I still had hope in my luggage. (This film won the Palme d’Or and is among such films as “Sex, Lies and Videos”, “Barton Fink”, “Wild at Heart” and “Pulp Fiction”.) Unfortunately, no – Anora’s cinematic fairy tale is more like a cinematic nightmare .