Anora
Sean Baker’s films like “The Florida Project” and “Red Rocket,” always center on people from the fringes. With “Anora,” his latest feature, he does something different: The main character is put on a fast track to extreme wealth almost immediately. The movie stars Mikey Madison (“Better Things”) in what should be a star making turn, an intensely vulnerable, physically and emotionally demanding one, as Anora, a 23 year old Uzbek American stripper and sex worker from Brighton Beach, Brooklyn she goes by Ani for short. Her Russian language skills get her connected with Ivan (Mark Eydelshteyn), a customer around her age who’s visiting from Russia, turns out he’s the son of an oligarch.
Ivan’s staying alone at his dad’s gated mansion for now, and he’s more than happy to throw money at Ani, she’s more than happy to take it. It doesn’t hurt that Ivan is also good natured and Chalamet haired the way Eydelshteyn does a somersault onto the bed before they first have sex is the kind of riotous comic touch that may or may not be improvised but feels right in line with Baker’s sensibility. Eventually after some wild partying Ani agrees to $15K for one week of being Ivan’s pretend girlfriend only. Heck, they might even do some stuff up to and including getting married in Vegas.
Torros (Baker regular Karren Karagulian, perhaps most memorably the cab driver in “Tangerine”), whose job it is to keep tabs on Ivan, gets wind of but not confirmation about the nuptials at a supremely inconvenient time I won’t spoil here. Let me just say that what follows mostly involves Torros and his henchmen (Yura Borisov and Vache Tovmasyan) dragging out their attempts to un-end the marriage. Even if as those around live-wire Ani quietly begin to realize she’s the best thing that ever happened to that spoiled idiot Ivan.
Certainly there are models for this set-up “Pretty Woman,” Billy Wilder’s “One, Two, Three” but the nearest thing is Baker’s screwball Christmas story “Tangerine.” Maybe this is a crypto-sequel to “Anora,” which again concentrates on the lives of prostitutes. Instead of Christmas in Los Angeles, it’s New Year’s in New York; its tone and pace keep changing until it finally settles into an exhilarating blast of cold air. Baker has developed a way of working with locations and actors that feels entirely his own (look out for other past collaborators, like Brittney Rodriguez from “Red Rocket”). His movies are also seamlessly political; they touch on immigration, discrimination, economics and city life in ways that feel completely organic to the comedy.
The last time Kirill Serebrennikov was at Cannes was in 2022 with “Tchaikovsky’s Wife”; he could be said to have made a triumphant return then, if not overshadowed by events beyond his control (namely Russia invading Ukraine). He couldn’t come to the festival at all before that with his two features previous to this one: “Summer” (2018) and “Petrov’s Flu” (2021), both because of legal troubles back home. (Arrested in 2017 on embezzlement charges universally seen as bogus, he was widely understood to have been punished for making work that irritated the Kremlin., according to The New York Times Magazine.) So it is hardly something to be taken for granted that Mr. Serebrennikov who no longer lives in Russia should have a movie competing here this year. But “Limonov. The Ballad” is about Eduard Limonov (Ben Whishaw), the Russian writer and provocateur who achieves what looks like his goal of going into exile (“Writers must be thrown out of their country,” he declares in the film. “They must be.”), only to come back and lead the ultranationalist National Bolshevik Party. As far as one can tell from the movie, the only consistent thing about his politics over time was that he chose whichever position would most enrage his audience.
In theory, a film could celebrate the political and sexual rebelliousness of a man who in the course of it extols Stalin and mourns the fall of the Berlin Wall, and who by 2020 before dying had approved of Russia’s annexation of Crimea while supporting Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine (the novel-style book by Emmanuel Carrère on which this movie is based started being written before Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022). But “Limonov. The Ballad” seems to take Limonov’s freewheeling invective as an end in itself. He was mad at everything all the time, so here’s a furious picture, and don’t you dare hope for narrative coherence. Mr. Serebrennikov has been careful to say that this isn’t really biography it is based on a novelistic account by Emmanuel Carrère but even his better films tend to feel like loud rambles, and he fails to corral the sprawl inherent in trying to capture a life as chaotic as Limonov’s
Much easier to understand and much better is Raoul Peck’s documentary “Ernest Cole: Lost and Found,” which can be seen in the festival’s Special Screenings section. A South African photographer, Cole (1940-90) documented life under apartheid in images that were published in a landmark book, “House of Bondage” (1967). The movie’s semi fictionalized voice over read by LaKeith Stanfield is first person from Cole’s perspective but drawn from the recollections of his friends, family and associates. Mostly, though not exclusively. Many of the scalding photographs that expose the injustices, casual cruelties and occasional absurdities of segregation in South Africa are Cole’s own. According to the film, 60,000 of his negatives were discovered in a Swedish bank vault in 2017.
In it, this version of Cole reflects on what he had to do (such as learning to shoot at eye level), what he saw (in one camp for people who’d been banished from their homes near the Botswana border, residents were so cut off they couldn’t remember what day it was) and how apartheid related to Jim Crow, which he photographed while living in exile in America. (“In New York,” says the voiceover, “my passport got me poverty.”) There are moments when “Ernest Cole: Lost and Found” could have been clearer about distinguishing between words that came from him directly and those adapted or borrowed from others speaking about him. But mostly it lets his pictures speak for themselves.
Also showing among special screenings, Oliver Stone and Rob Wilson’s “Lula” is relatively conventional by Stone standards an account of current Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s career and worldview as a left wing hero who made a spectacular comeback during the country’s 2022 election cycle against far-right incumbent Jair Bolsonaro, after having spent 18 months in prison on convictions that were later annulled.
In a sit-down interview, Lula and Stone touch on a lot of interesting subjects where Stone puts Lula’s politics on the spectrum (Stone jokes that his background might have made him tend toward either communism or conservatism) and his relationships with recent American presidents. But it’s also largely old news (the interview was conducted 10 months before the election), and Stone is so prone to casually entertaining conspiratorial interpretations of events that it’s hard to trust him as a guide.
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