Anora

A strip club named Headquarters in Manhattan

  

Sean Baker's Anora is  Little Fugitive meets Leaving Las Vegas. If you remember the main character of Ray Ashley's l953 masterpiece runs away after becoming the victim of a prank--where he's made to think he's accidentally killed his brother. Anora is about a lost child, Ivan/Vanya (Mark Eydelshteyn), only his parents are Russian oligarchs and the bait is the lap dancer of the film's title (Mikey Madison). Las Vegas and a Brooklyn lap dance club, Headquarters, not far from the iconic Cyclone, provide the commodification that guides the bravado and slapstick. The keystone cops meet L'Avventura as the movie, a sequence of jarring cultural clashes, deftly wends its way through the clutter of sex and mock violence (that's plenty violent) to edge it's way into the seemingly alien universe of human emotion. Remember the cut where Monica Vitti comes upon her lover, the Italian aristocrat Sandro (Gabriele Ferzetti) in the arms of a 19-year-old American actress and would be writer Gloria Perkins (Dorothy de Poliolo). There's a similar kind of emotional dynamite in the final scene of Baker's movie. Anora gives her minder, Igor (Yuri Borisov), an angry lap dance which begins as a slap in the face. Then the garish is transformed into something resembling human love. It's one of those moments in film when the camera continues to move, but life stops. You might look at the characters being portrayed as a thug and a lap dancer, but they attain a purity that transcends the parameters of their lives. The other memorable moment in the film is the one is which Anora's whole delusion falls apart. The violence bifurcates the action. It's comparable to one of those natural disasters that recently hit the Southeast. The destruction is furious, unredeemable and at the same time such a perfect blitz that it leaves the viewer awestruck, gapingly openmouthed--like the nurse in Potemkin (yes the audience), and horrifyingly stunned.

"God Bless Pig Latin America" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

and read "Ultimate Rejection!" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star