Film review

  • Anora

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Sean Baker (2024)

    It was a coincidence – and, to me, a surprise – that I saw two screwball comedies in succession at this year’s London Film Festival:  I hadn’t realised that Anora, winner of the Cannes Palme d’Or, is widely regarded as a ‘contemporary return to screwball tradition’ (Justin Chang).  There’s nevertheless some distance between George Stevens’ The Talk of the Town and Sean Baker’s latest – eighty-two years, for a start.  Much more happens in the Stevens film yet writer-director Baker’s goes on a lot longer.  And Anora – whose title character is a young sex worker – puts the screw into screwball.

    The film’s first hour mostly comprises scenes in Headquarters, a Manhattan strip club, and a bedroom in the Brooklyn mansion of a Russian oligarch.  Anora (Mikey Madison), who prefers to be called Ani, works at the club.  After she and the other girl table dancers have done their routines on stage, they escort the men who’ve watched them to backstage cubicles for further entertainment.  One of these male punters, and an unusually young one, is Ivan, aka Vanya (Mark Eydelshteyn), son of fabulously wealthy Nikolai Zakharov.  Vanya is meant to be studying in New York but spends his time partying and playing video games.  His English is limited:  Ani, who has Russian ancestry and can speak the language, is the obvious partner for him when he visits Headquarters.  He enjoys her company so much that he hires her for sex sessions at his father’s home then offers her $15,000 to stay with him for a week.  During that time, Vanya heads for Las Vegas, where he asks Ani to marry him.  He insists that he loves her.  They tie the knot in a Vegas wedding chapel.

    The set-up evokes, rather than vintage screwball, two other films of more recent but still distant decades – one a musical, Sweet Charity (1969), the other a romcom, Pretty Woman (1990).  Unlike Charity Hope Valentine, a taxi dancer in the Fandango Ballroom, who’s looking for love and incurably romantic, Ani is candidly materialistic.  Even so, she wants more than her work in the strip club gives her, which brings to mind one of Sweet Charity‘s best numbers, ‘There’s Gotta Be Something Better Than This’.  Unexpected wedding bells are also a big part of Sweet Charity.  As for Pretty Woman, Ani’s seven-day arrangement with Vanya clearly echoes the arrangement between Julia Roberts’ Vivian, a Hollywood escort, and Richard Gere’s wealthy businessman who hires her for a week, which results in a whirlwind romance.  The resemblances between these movies and Anora don’t go much further, though.  Vanya’s ulterior motive in marrying Ani emerges when he mentions obtaining a green card so that he can stay in the US rather than return to Russia and work for his father.  Once his parents find out about the marriage, their inept henchmen in America, whose job it is to keep an eye on Vanya, are instructed to apprehend the newlyweds and arrange an annulment.  That process, which accounts for nearly the whole of the rest of Baker’s film, involves a lengthy physical fight between Anora and her captors, and torrents of four-letter words (seven-letter words when the adjective’s used).  Mary Whitehouse et al, who notoriously used to count the bloodys in Till Death Us Do Part, could never have kept up with this onslaught.

    The arrival of Vanya’s godfather, Toros (Karren Karagulian, who worked with Baker on Tangerine (2015)), and his sidekicks at the Zakharovs’ Brooklyn home marks a violent change also in the film’s visual rhythm.  Until then, the camerawork (Drew Daniels) and editing (Sean Baker himself) are relentlessly jumpy – there are very many short scenes.  Once Vanya has absconded from his father’s mansion and Ani is being held there against her will, the action shifts into real time – with characters, chiefly Ani and Toros, yelling at each other over and over again.  Toros is not only Vanya’s godfather but an Orthodox priest; he’s conducting a baptism in his church when he gets the bad-news phone call from Vanya’s domineering mother.  He has to excuse himself and changes quickly out of vestments into civvies.  This gag went down a storm with plenty of the Royal Festival Hall audience though once Baker’s done the gag, he forgets about the character’s priestly side.  (I don’t know if he’s making a particular point about complicity between Russian oligarchs and the Orthodox Church – or just lampooning pious hypocrites, a comedy staple.).  Ani, Toros and his cronies – Garnick (Vache Tovmasyan) and Igor (Yura Borisov) – tour Brooklyn looking for Vanya and eventually track him down in Headquarters, his last stop on a bender.  Nikolai Zakharov (Aleksei Serebryakov) and his fearsome wife, Galina (Darya Ekamasova), then arrive from Russia in their private jet for a climactic showdown.

    Ami keeps hoping throughout this that Vanya truly loves her; she’s crushed when he tells her not to be stupid and that, of course, now that his parents are on the case, the marriage will be annulled.  Sean Baker’s snap conversion of his heroine to victim was one of my main problems with the film.  Ani is nobody’s fool during Vanya’s ‘courtship’ – she’s incredulous, then sceptical, when he proposes marriage.  Baker never even implies that Vanya’s in love with Ani – he just loves having sex with her.  And although they laugh plenty together in the bedroom, there’s not much to suggest she wants anything from him except his money.  It’s understandable, in order to give the film some emotional substance in its second half, that Ani gets her heart broken – but it’s not convincing.  Mikey Madison is remarkable, though.  She had a small part (as one of the Manson Family) in Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood (2019); her only lead role before this one, as far as I can tell, was in a 2017 drama, directed by Terry Sanders, called Liza, Liza, Skies Are Grey.  Yet Baker knew Madison well enough to write the title role in Anora for her / and asks a lot of her, not least in the sex scenes.  According to their press conference at Cannes, Madison turned down the offer of an intimacy coordinator because she’d ‘already created a really comfortable relationship’ with Baker and his wife, Samantha Quan, who produced the film with him:  the couple, says Wikipedia, ‘would act out different sex positions to demonstrate what they wanted the actors to do’.  Mikey Madison carries the film truthfully (or as truthfully as is possible) and powerfully.

    Boyish Mark Eydelshteyn looks very right and is funny – especially in a gymnastic move on the bed when Vanya and Ani first sleep together – until Vanya’s alarmingly jejune character is fully revealed.  The outstanding supporting performance, however, comes from Yura Borisov (excellent too in Compartment No 6 (2021)).  As the taciturn, uncomfortable Igor, Borisov has a head start:  with everyone around him so volubly loud, he’s bound to stand out.  Once he’s wrestled noisily with Ani to pin her down, Igor is a man of few words but Borisov hits the target with every single line.  To be fair, Vache Tovmasyan, on a rare opportunity to underplay, also scores.  Garnick gets kicked in the face by Ani – probably gets his nose broken.  When Toros reels off to her the crimes she could be charged with, Garnick feelingly but sotto voce, adds ‘assault’ to the list.

    As I write this, there are 158 critics’ reviews of Anora on Rotten Tomatoes and all but two are fresh.  The film is hotly tipped for major success in the coming awards season.  I don’t really get this.  The film is way too long (139 minutes) – it could lose half an hour without losing much else.  As indicated above, Ani’s crucial transformation from material girl to betrayed romantic is contrived.  Even so, I can see Anora has merits:  each of the main characters, repetitive as they are, is well played; the same yelled expletives account for a lot of the dialogue but the mixture of English and Russian (and Armenian?) is a big help in sustaining the chaotic momentum.  All in all, I find it easier to understand how people can admire the film than how they can enjoy it.  I found it gruelling to sit through because it’s often visually and sonically challenging; and lowering, because it describes lives that, to be honest, horrify me.  A few of the headline reviews of Rotten Tomatoes’ ‘Top Critics’ give a clue to Anora’s appeal.  The film ‘takes audiences on one wild ride’ (Randy Myers); watching it ‘is like riding shotgun alongside a reckless driver’ (Leonard Maltin); ‘our pulses race, our eyes grow wide, our hearts dance …’ (Kristy Puchko).  In other words, Anora is, literally, sensational:  it makes us really feel.

    Judging by some audience reactions at the screening I was at, it doesn’t matter how transient or contradictory those feelings are.  When Galina pressures her to board the plane to Las Vegas where the marriage will be annulled, Ani says she won’t be doing anything until she gets a lawyer; she informs her mother-in-law that she didn’t sign a pre-nup, is going to sue and will end up with half of what Vanya’s worth.  Cue gales of applause in the Festival Hall:  yay, our feisty girl’s gonna show them, and win big!  Never mind that Galina, coldly contemptuous, replies that Ani hasn’t a hope of winning a law suit (the Zakharovs will prove she’s a penniless gold-digger) – or that Ani immediately accepts defeat and gets on the plane.  After signing the annulment paperwork, Ani prepares to take her leave of the Zakharovs.  When Galina says good riddance and brands her a whore, Ani comes back with, ‘Yes, and your son hates you so much he was prepared to marry a whore to get away from you’.  Another yay moment but the audience liked it even more that Ani’s riposte gets Nikolai Zakharov laughing.  It’s true Aleksei Serebryakov does this very well:  his face hasn’t cracked up to this point so Nikolai’s gleeful mirth is bound to have impact.  But it baffled me that people could take pleasure in the pleasure of a character whose vast fortune is the root cause of his son’s feckless cruelty.  Those in stitches at Nikolai’s laughter just seemed to be following suit:  well, he’s enjoying himself so I will, too.

    It becomes pretty obvious that Ani will end up with Igor, who escorts her back from Las Vegas to New York to pack up her belongings.  On her last night in the Zakharov mansion, they have a mutually wary – but sometimes mutually amused – conversation, though nothing more.  Next morning, he drives her back to her own tiny Brooklyn home.  He gives her the $10,000 compensation payment she was promised by Toros.  Igor has also managed to get hold of the wedding ring that Toros took from her, and returns it to Ani.  She says little but initiates sex with him, in the front of the car.  When he tries to kiss her, Ani recoils.  She then bursts into tears and lets Igor hold her; in Anora‘s closing shot she’s still in his arms.  I just don’t respond to this film the way lots of others do.  I not only can’t share the enthusiasm of reviewers I’ve read; I also tend to disagree with their few reservations.  Here’s another Rotten Tomatoes ‘Top Critic’, Olivia Hunter Willke:  ‘Although the film carries its head high for nearly the entire runtime, it might just undersell itself in the last moments’.  I think these moments – when the film starts taking its time in a good way – are the best moments.

    15 October 2024

  • The Talk of the Town

    Old YorkerFilm review

    George Stevens (1942)

    This London Film Festival screening of George Stevens’ comedy was made even better by BFI curator Robin Baker’s introduction – entertaining, informative and thought-provoking all at once.  Baker picked up on the received wisdom that Stevens’ work underwent a sea change as a result of his experiences in World War II.  A member of the US Army Signal Corps, he headed a film unit from 1943 through to 1946, shooting footage of the D-Day landings and the Allies’ grim discoveries at Dachau.  Stevens had been best known in Hollywood as a director of comedies, including Alice Adams (1935) and Woman of the Year (1942), and even directed the Astaire-Rogers musical Swing Time (1937).  He subsequently graduated to weightier, sometimes tragic, drama.  You can see that switch happening almost in the course of his first post-war feature, I Remember Mama (1948); over the next decade or so, he went on to make A Place in the Sun (1951), Shane (1953), Giant (1956) and The Diary of Anne Frank (1959).  Without dissenting from the conventional view of Stevens’ development, Robin Baker was keen to point out there were signs in his earlier films – this one included – of a less light-hearted sensibility at work.  The Talk of the Town (written by Irwin Shaw, Sidney Buchman and Sidney Harmon) proved Baker right but that didn’t stop it from being great fun also.

    Three people find themselves unexpectedly sharing a house in the suburbs of a New England town.  Schoolteacher Nora Shelley (Jean Arthur) has rented the place out for the summer.  As she readies it for the arrival next day of the new tenant, another man makes an uninvited entrance.  This is Leopold Dilg (Cary Grant), whom Nora has known since they were at school together – and whom we already know from the film’s prologue, in which George Stevens expertly sets the scene.  A fire in a local woollen mill left the mill foreman dead.  Dilg, a mill worker and political activist, was standing trial for arson and murder but has escaped from jail and is on the run.  Nora is deep in agitated conversation with Leopold when distinguished legal scholar, Professor Michael Lightcap (Ronald Colman), who has rented the house as a quiet place to complete his latest book, turns up on the doorstep – a day early.  Nora hides Leopold in the attic but it’s not long before Lightcap catches sight of him; Nora then passes him off as her gardener, Joseph.  Visitors to the house in the days to follow also include Dilg’s lawyer, Sam Yates (Edgar Buchanan); Lightcap’s valet and chauffeur, Tilney (Rex Ingram); and Senator Boyd (Clyde Fillmore), sent by the White House to inform Lightcap that the president wishes to nominate him to a vacancy on the Supreme Court.  Boyd is sure the confirmation process will be a formality (times change) but the matter must remain hush-hush for a while yet.

    Nora’s two main guests are chalk and cheese.  Leopold, a local boy made bad, is a grown-man holy terror.  Lightcap is a bearded yet rather childish pedant and a confirmed bachelor, old before his time.  Dilg has been a thorn in the flesh of his boss, Andrew Holmes (Charles Dingle), for some time, telling anyone who cares to listen that the mill owner is a crook.  The professor assures Senator Boyd, when the latter mentions it will be better for Lightcap to keep his name out of the newspapers in the immediate future, that ‘I’ve been keeping my name out of the papers for years’.  He and Leopold do, though, share an interest in legal matters and, in the days ahead, enjoy spirited discussions that reflect their common sense vs academic approaches to the law.  It soon emerges they also share a liking for Nora (who’s been keen on Leopold since their schooldays).  Lightcap’s new-found ardour, which takes him by surprise, transforms his behaviour in other ways, and eventually makes him headline news.  In due course he discovers Leopold’s true identity but, suspicious of the prosecution case against him, turns on-the-hoof investigator.  This involves pretending to court the mill foreman’s girlfriend, Regina Bush (Glenda Farrell), owner of a local beauty parlour.  Plying Regina with drinks to loosen her tongue, Lightcap learns that the foreman, Clyde Bracken, is alive and well and hiding out in Boston.

    There are plenty of funny bits – among the best are those where Lightcap is suspected of being the man on the run from the law.  He happens to be wearing Dilg’s footwear just as police arrive at the house:  the professor runs round the place trying to escape the attentions of sniffer dogs.  He visits Pulaski’s Polish deli to buy borscht.  Jan Pulaski (Leonard Kinskey) knows Leopold Dilg is the only customer of his who insists on borscht with an egg beaten up in it.  When Lightcap specifies the beaten egg Jan smells a rat though his mother (Ferike Boros) is more sceptical:  ‘You think he’s Leopold Dilg with a beard, huh?’  (Undaunted, Jan reports his suspicions to the police.)  Glenda Farrell delivers a great turn as Regina Bush, telling Lightcap about the tragic discovery of her lover’s remains (or lack of) after the mill fire:  ‘All they found of Bracken was a medal he had won in school.  It gives a girl a queer feeling.  One night, you got a man weighing 211 pounds – then, wham, all that’s left is a medal for shot-putting’.

    The Talk of the Town‘s harsher aspect comes through in skulduggery so central to the plot that it’s increasingly hard to ignore, despite the screwball antics on display.  Holmes has burned his own premises down to get an insurance payout and frames Dilg to pay him back.  The trial judge, Sam Yates is sure, is in Holmes’s pocket.  Lightcap, Leopold and Nora join forces to abduct Bracken (Tom Tyler) from Boston and bring him back to Nora’s house.  Her two companions argue about whether to telephone the police; Bracken knocks them both unconscious and escapes, though not before Lightcap has won the argument and made the call.  The police arrive at the house and re-arrest Dilg.  The mood darkens further when a mob of angry locals descends on the courthouse where his trial resumes; they’re threatening to lynch the accused when Lightcap arrives on the scene, accompanied by the supposedly deceased foreman.  The professor’s approach to the law has moved a long way from the theoretical in the direction of the practical:  he has made a citizen’s arrest of Bracken, holding him at gunpoint.  Lightcap then delivers an impassioned speech to the court on the paramount importance of the rule of law – in theory and practice.  Dilg is acquitted.  The mill owner and his foreman are indicted.

    In other words, the film turns serious enough to make explicit, through Lightcap’s speech, the moral of the story.  George Stevens asks a lot of himself in negotiating this marked change of tone:  the courtroom climax is slightly awkward.  Even so, Ronald Colman lays down the law with the gracefully light touch that’s the hallmark of his admirable performance throughout.  For much of the time, Cary Grant, enjoyable as he is, doesn’t seem quite right as a common-man political animal (let alone a lethal lawbreaker).  Yet he’s so right in the end he makes you question your earlier doubts.  You understand what Nora feels:  that Leopold’s elusive quality is both what makes him maddening and the source of his charm.  That same quality allows for a degree of suspense, right through to the closing minutes, as to which of the two men Nora will opt for romantically.

    The professor, whom she’s grown fond of, is duly appointed to the Supreme Court; Nora, with Leopold in tow, goes to Washington for Lightcap’s inaugural sitting as an Associate Justice.  Nora’s former tenant now conveniently reverts to his old order of priorities:  his Supreme Court appointment is, he says, the fulfilment of his life’s ambition.  But he’s still a kinder man than he used to be.  Lightcap also tells Nora that his happiness will be complete if his two friends spend the rest of their lives together.  The film’s last few seconds make clear that they will.  Jean Arthur, the ideal emotional fulcrum between Leopold and Lightcap, is intensely likeable:  you always root for Nora, especially when she’s thwarted or exasperated (as she often is).  Arthur, a fine comedienne, is more athletic than I expected from what I’d seen of her before – she gives off a lovely suppressed energy that serves to express Nora’s strength of feeling.  Robin Baker’s introduction described Jean Arthur as the film’s ‘beating heart’; it makes good sense that the woman she plays ends up with a man whose heart’s in the right place.  The Talk of the Town, as part of the ‘Treasures’ strand at this year’s London Film Festival, was in the right place, too.

    13 October 2024

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