A-Directed by Sean Baker Starring Mikey Madison and Mark Eydelshteyn Review by Jon Kissel |  |
Sean Baker reaches a career crescendo with Anora, his Cinderella-meets-Uncut-Gems modern fairy tale that embodies the idea that movies are magic tricks. The viewer knows that they are sitting in a theater or at their home watching actors being filmed in a chaotic production setting that has no relationship to what’s happening in the camera, but they’re transported anyway to feel what the actor is feeling and take in what the director is pointing the camera at. Everyone agrees that it’s an illusion, and everyone plays along. That agreement is at the core of Anora’s story, where a Brooklyn stripper gets entangled with a Russian oligarch scion. He knows that she’s in the customer service industry, and she knows that he knows. Is there ever that magical cinematic transition of transfixing teleportation, where the falseness fades away and something else takes its place? While the viewer waits and watches for that moment onscreen, they feel it themselves over and over again through Baker’s anarchic, full-bodied, invigorating filmmaking.
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