Sean Baker’s “Anora” can’t seem to decide if it’s a genre movie or a more ambitious examination of how money dominates the lives of marginalized people living in society’s shadowy corners. This subject matter is Baker’s forte, and he mined it confidently in films like “Tangerine” and the especially audacious “Red Rocket.” In “Anora,” though, it feels like Baker actively wants a hit on his terms, and he dilutes his strengths as well as the general pleasures of a genre film. It’s a worst of both worlds situation.
Ani (Mikey Madison) is an erotic dancer in a Brooklyn club, and Baker is at his best sketching in the particulars of her profession, from connecting with johns to juggling the petty irritations of dealing with scheduling, co-workers, etc. Baker is too hip to cast these scenes in a cautionary light. He takes Ani and everyone else on their terms, and this empathy gives “Anora” a modern buzz that’s intensified by the taut, seemingly caught-on-the-fly camerawork and the unusually casual sexuality.
Baker is particularly specific about the etiquette of dances and sex for money and the human behaviors that surround these transactions. This is the rare movie with onscreen sex that suggests the act as it’s experienced in life, with a focus on movement and spontaneous emotion rather than soft-core atmospherics. Again: Baker doesn’t score points, neither on the woman working the club nor even on the johns, who often exhibit a tenderness and vulnerability that is not fashionable for films to acknowledge. For a half hour or so, “Anora” is every inch the sensual volatile humanist thriller that the media has been claiming it to be since it won the Palme d’Or at last year’s Cannes.
Enter Ivan (Mark Eidelshtein), a kid in his early 20s, clearly a trust fund case, who hits it off with Ani at the club. Ivan pays Ani for sex, but transactional lines blur as they often do in genre movies about fantasy liaisons between young men and beautiful prostitutes. He offers to pay her 15k for a week as his girlfriend, in an exchange that is very similar to a scene in Garry Marshall’s considerably less hip 1990 rom-com “Pretty Woman.” Baker knows that you are drawing up this comparison in your mind, if you’re of a certain age at least. Some of Ani and Ivan’s dialogue is borrowed directly from Richard Gere’s proposal to Julia Roberts. The joke, a good one, is that we are seeing Hollywood glitz re-channeled through the scrim of young, sleazy, too-cool-for-school modern hipsters.
For a while longer, “Anora” maintains its buzz, its sense of pleasure intermingling with looming chaos. Ivan is a familiar kind of character played by Eidelstein with a lack of self-consciousness that has a real kick to it. Baker sees this character clearly — his selfishness, childishness, and unearned spoils — without editorializing him. Ivan is a readymade opportunity for a dogmatic filmmaker to decry the “one percent” or whatever, and Baker resists.
For Baker sees something else in him as well: that the kid’s rapacious lack of shame is intoxicating in short bursts. Baker’s willingness to meet his characters head on without a concern for speechifying is one of his trademarks. Remember that in “Red Rocket,” he nurtured our complicity with an older guy sleeping with a teenager that he hopes to turn into a porn star, after all. Baker likes coaxing discomfort between audiences and his characters, but he loses focus here.
Once Ani leaves the club and enters into the proper plot with Ivan, the bottom drops out of the movie, and it becomes a disastrous muddle of sentimental plot points that are meant to be obscured by the raw acting and neorealist camera gymnastics. Baker is good at this sort of thing, but “Anora” becomes shallow and, worse, repetitive.
For “Anora” to work, you have to either be invested in Ani and Ivan’s relationship, which is based only on sex and money, or in Ani herself, a charismatic cipher who becomes a second banana in her own movie, or in the inevitable death of Ani’s belief in this absurd relationship that is impossible in the world as we know it. Baker tries to blend this contrived set-up, on loan from dozens of movies, with a turbo-charged, hyper-pressurized farce of brutally pragmatic underworld negotiation, in which desperate characters are driven to extremes trying to correct a problem. Think “Something Wild” or “Pretty Woman” crossed with a Josh and Benny Safdie movie. It doesn’t quite jell.
I didn’t buy Ani’s commitment to Ivan, even on movie terms. People frequently deceive themselves, usually out of desperation, except that Baker doesn’t establish Ani’s desperation. There’s a pivotal element here that the filmmakers don’t bring off: Ani’s marginalization by the external forces seeking to control her and destroy her relationship needs to feel ironic rather than a convenience of plotting. Mikey Madison is striking but she doesn’t give Ani an inner life and Baker doesn’t seem to mind. This very long movie about very little needs a presence to tie its various pieces together.
“Anora” turns into one of those improvisational-feeling movies in which actors appear to believe that it’s the height of gritty realism to scream obscenities in one another’s faces over and over at full volume. This is basically a 140-minute shaggy dog joke with delusions of socio-realist romantic grandeur. If that sounds like an odd and unpromising collection of words to you, you’ve proved my point.
Yes, it’s been out a few weeks, but Parker Finn’s “Smile 2” is a more involving story of a woman’s battle with capitalist forces than “Anora.” It is among the year’s biggest surprises, in fact, a stylish metaphorical thriller in horror-of-the-week clothing.
The first “Smile” was better than it had to be as well, following a woman who attempted to duck her fate at the hands of a socially communicable demon. The rules don’t make much sense and I won’t bother to elaborate, but let’s say that the demon has seen movies like “Ringu,” its American counterpart “The Ring,” and “It Follows,” among others. Finn displayed a commanding sense of gothic atmosphere that expressed the haunted psyches of his characters. At a certain point though, “Smile” succumbed to the limitations of its premise. It’s a creepy and surprisingly potent symbolic exploration of the aftereffects of suicide, but it’s also quite literally a prolonged death march.
“Smile 2” ups the ante by making the cursed protagonist a pop star in the mold of Lady Gaga, called Skye Riley (Naomi Scott). This time, then, the horrors unfold not in the usual suburban sprawls and institutions, but against the endless frenetic energy of sets, concerts, fan meet-and-greets, and PR strategy sessions. Finn is actually interested in this stuff, as the film is a character study that just happens to pivot on the return of an otherworldly monster that can imprison you in hallucinations before eating your soul. Finn utilizes the monster for different metaphors this time: for addiction, as Skye is a recovering addict with a nasty tragedy in her past, and for how celebrities presume to feel that fame, while giving plenty, takes them apart piece by piece.
This is how you balance message with genre, thrills with an interest in social infrastructure. The monster can appear anywhere, anytime, and resemble anyone, and Finn effortlessly keys that paranoia into the uprooted feelings of a person in recovery who must spend much of her time second-guessing people’s motivations. Finn’s set pieces are inventive and surprisingly ambitious and even beautiful, especially a scene in which the monster pretends to be a coterie of background dancers that suggests “Repulsion” as restaged by Bob Fosse. Another scene, the filming of a video for one of Skye’s songs, uses color and pulsing editing to express Skye’s growing alienation.
“Smile 2” is less the teenage horror movie of the week than a poem of despair, with real formal sizzle, that suggests modern expressionist horror movies like “Black Swan” and “Neon Demon.” The film’s ending, a knockout, likens the modern media fame game to nothing less than ritual sacrifice.
“Anora” and “Smile 2” are both playing in theaters everywhere.
