“I don’t know why film school teaches you certain things; I really don’t,” filmmaker Sean Baker says, shaking his head. “I’ve had to unlearn everything I learned.”
Maybe that’s not a ringing endorsement for Baker’s alma mater, but the unlearning has worked for him. The independent filmmaker from New Jersey has directed eight features, and his most recent one, Anora, won the Palme d’Or at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival.
“I honestly did not have any expectations for the movie,” Baker says regarding Anora’s chance in Cannes’ Main Competition. And, as he points out, it’s rare that “a film with overt comedy in it will win the Palme d’Or.”
But anyone who has seen Tangerine, The Florida Project or Red Rocket knows comedy is far from rare in a Baker movie. It’s essential. And in Anora, a magnificently energetic, high-pitched screwball comedy of chaos provides the bulk of the narrative.
Set in New York City, Anora centers on Ani (Mikey Madison), an exotic dancer who can speak a little Russian and ends up in the lap of Ivan (Mark Eidelshtein), the son of a wealthy Russian oligarch. Ivan is a spoiled rich kid with the attention span of a gnat, but he’s a party to be around and has the cash to support it. He buys Ani’s company for a week, then proposes marriage. She says yes, and quicker than you can run off to Las Vegas’ Little White Wedding Chapel, the two are hitched and mommy and daddy oligarch are pissed. So they call in Ivan’s handlers, Toros (Karren Karagulian), Garnick (Vache Tovmasyan) and Igor (Yura Borisov), to manage the situation. Then everything goes sideways.
“I knew there was going to be this home invasion moment or sequence,” Baker says. “As we started fleshing it out, I realized: ‘OK, I want this to be the showstopper.’ I want this to be the thing after an hour-long montage — an abridged version of a romantic comedy — [that] was going to slow everything down and keep the audience sitting in this real-time, scary, threatening incident that Ani is going through.”
‘A Stockholm syndrome-type thing’
Baker explains that this scene — one of the movie’s best — wasn’t the genesis of Anora but the place where disparate ideas converged into the narrative at hand.
“[Anora] started from my desire to tell a story in the Russian American community in Brighton Beach and Coney Island, Brooklyn,” he says.
Then, while making Red Rocket, Baker heard a story about “a young woman being held as collateral by the Russian mob because her husband owed money,” he says. “And she started to realize over the course of 24 hours that she married the wrong man because he never came to her rescue.”
So, “she started to experience a Stockholm syndrome-type thing, where she was gravitating toward her captors.”
It was an intriguing plot, but Baker didn’t want to tell a gangster story. “And that’s when we came up with the idea of her marrying the son of a Russian oligarch.”
Then, in 2022, the final piece fell into place.
“Scream opened, and that’s when I saw Mikey [Madison] and knew she was our Ani,” Baker says. “Had the meeting with her and said: ‘If you’re down for this, I will go write this screenplay.’... That’s what really got the ball rolling.”
Space to create
Anora is Baker’s fifth movie exploring the world of sex work. After winning the Palme in May, the 53-year-old filmmaker dedicated the award to “sex workers past, present and future,” adding that sex work should be decriminalized and “not in any way regulated.”
“It’s a sex worker’s body, and it’s up to them to decide how they will use it in their livelihood,” Baker said at the Cannes press conference.
But it’s not just the profession that connects Anora to Baker’s previous films. His ability to create space for his actors to craft performances is unparalleled. Everyone here, from Madison to Karagulian and especially Borisov, plays their roles so close to the bone that they feel found, not formed.
“My actors were giving me such gold every day that I knew about a week in that we were making something special,” Baker says. “And it was because of the performances.”
Baker isn’t wrong, but he’s being modest. The performances are gold, but so is the script, the direction, the cinematography, the editing — everything. Anora is indeed something special, and Baker is one of the most fascinating voices in American cinema. His Palme d’Or isn’t just deserved; it’s overdue.
ON SCREEN: Anora is currently playing in theaters.
Find more Boulder Weekly film coverage here.