ANORA
Sean Baker explores new horizons in Competition
The American director Sean Baker is back in Competition with Anora, three years on from Red Rocket. In this new comedy-drama, he steps away from the marginalised settings he loves and locates his characters in his home city of New York.
Anora, a young stripper from Brooklyn, falls in love with the son of a Russian oligarch. A fairy tale seems to be unfolding and marriage is on the horizon, but that’s before her lover’s parents get involved: they are determined to damage the relationship.
We have become used to Sean Baker’s films of isolated bubbles, tucked into the margins of dreamlike places. In Tangerine (2015) he used an iPhone to film sex workers on the streets of Hollywood, beneath tangerine-coloured lights. Two years later, for The Florida Project, he set himself up in a motel close to Disney World where little Moonee and her mother lived out the everyday struggles of their precarious existence.
After these films, which were acclaimed for their freshness, Sean Baker’s story become part of Cannes in Competition, with Red Rocket. Here too, he chose a character on the margins and a bleak universe: a retired porn actor, forced to camp out on his ex-wife’s sofa in his Texas home town.
Anora marks a departure from his previous films. While the eponymous character, a stripper, remains in the Baker genre, the universe she moves through expresses the director’s stated wish to “make a film about rich people”.
The other innovation is the distribution. Whereas he previously favoured castings via social media, Sean Baker invited Mikey Madison (spotted in the final sections of Scream) to portray Anora, alongside Yuriy Borisov, who featured in Competition in 2021 in Petrov’s Flu by Kirill Serebrennikov and Compartment No.6 by Juho Kuosmanen.
