‘Anora’ | Anatomy of a Scene
new video loaded: More
Baker, Sean (1971- )
Subterms
Latest story
More stories
- in Movies
Watch Mikey Madison Take a Mansion Tour in ‘Anora’
The writer, director and editor Sean Baker narrates an early sequence from his film, which also features Mark Eydelshteyn.In “Anatomy of a Scene,” we ask directors to reveal the secrets that go into making key scenes in their movies. See new episodes in the series on Fridays. You can also watch our collection of more than 150 videos on YouTube and subscribe to our YouTube channel.When Ani (Mikey Madison) agrees to meet one of her young strip-club clients, Ivan (Mark Eydelshteyn), at his home, she is taken aback by just how lavish that home is. That’s the setup for this scene from “Anora,” which follows the budding relationship, both transactional and emotional, between the title character, Ani, and Ivan.This sequence takes place before Ani learns that Ivan is the son of a Russian oligarch, and it is crafted to give both Ani and the audience an eye-opening look at the outsize abundance of Ivan’s space.Narrating the scene, the film’s writer, director and editor, Sean Baker, said, “I wanted the camera to essentially be following Ani, but also be seeing the world through Ani’s eyes.” He achieved this by keeping the cuts to a minimum. After Ani rings the doorbell and Ivan answers, the bulk of the sequence unfolds in one shot, following her with a hand-held camera (operated by the cinematographer Drew Daniels) as she marvels over the mansion.“It really sets up the geography,” Baker said, “because the geography is going to be extremely important later on in the film.”Read the “Anora” review.Learn more about Mikey Madison.Sign up for the Movies Update newsletter and get a roundup of reviews, news, Critics’ Picks and more. More
- in Movies
Mikey Madison Finds Common Ground With Her Character in ‘Anora’
Mikey Madison, by her own admission, cries a lot — whether she’s happy or sad, that’s how she expresses herself.During our conversation at a Midtown Manhattan restaurant, the star of the Palme d’Or-winning “Anora” told me a number of stories that involved weeping. She cried on the way home from a horseback-riding competition when she was a teenager and realized she would have to choose between life as an equestrian or an actor. (She was too single-minded to do both.) She cried after every single acting class in the early days of her career. She cried after her first Russian language session in preparation for this latest role.But when she was living in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Brighton Beach to shoot “Anora,” Sean Baker’s film about a tough-as-nails sex worker who impulsively marries a Russian oligarch’s son, she found that the tears didn’t come easily. “I was, like, holding it in in a way that I hadn’t done before,” she recalled. “And I was like, ‘Am I numb? What’s happening here?’” She ultimately realized it was something different: the title character, known as Ani, was taking hold of her in a way that had never happened in her career. She had heard fellow actors talk about that kind of thing, but had never related to it before.Mikey Madison with Mark Eydelshteyn in “Anora,” which won the Palme d’Or at Cannes.NeonIt makes sense that Ani would exert a certain power over Madison because “Anora” is a monumental film in the 25-year-old’s career. Though she had memorable parts in the movies “Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood” (2019) and “Scream” (2022) and a crucial role on “Better Things,” the critically acclaimed FX series, “Anora” raises her to a new echelon in Hollywood. Almost as soon as the film premiered at Cannes, Madison was given the “star is born” treatment and declared a potential Oscar nominee. When “Anora” hit the Telluride Film Festival a few months later, a producer told Variety, “I need to work with Mikey Madison ASAP.”The film begins one night at her strip club gig, when her boss instructs her to talk to a patron, Ivan (Mark Eydelshteyn), who asked for a Russian-speaking girl. Turns out he’s wildly rich, and their whirlwind romance leads to a quickie marriage. But when his parents learn of it and send heavies to arrange their annulment, Ani refuses to go quietly. She fights off men twice her size with piercing screams and shockingly powerful kicks. For all that ferociousness, Madison also conveys how Ani’s thick skin is a form of self-defense against a world that rewards those, like Ivan, with easy access to money and finds new ways to punish those who don’t. Over the course of the action, you watch exhaustion seep into her face, which once glowed with the possibility of a fairy-tale ending.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More
- in Movies
‘Anora’ Review: A Pretty Woman From Brooklyn
Mikey Madison gives a career-making performance in a Palme d’Or-winning film about the romance between a sex worker and a rich scion.Sometimes a movie actually earns the old cliché of a “star-making turn,” and I’m here to say that Sean Baker’s “Anora” is this year’s star maker. I’ve seen it twice, and both times I left the theater on a high, exhilarated by the performances, the rhythm, the emotional shape of it. The only question that remains — and it’s a great one to have to ask — is exactly whose star “Anora” will make.One obvious (and obviously correct) answer is Mikey Madison, who plays the titular character. Madison is no newcomer; she played Sadie, a Manson family member, in Quentin Tarantino’s “Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood”; and Pamela Adlon’s oldest daughter, Max, on the terrific FX show “Better Things.”Madison has always been good, an ingénue with extraordinarily expressive features who can play bratty and naïve at the same time. But this role requires her to go for broke, with elements of slapstick, romance, comedy and tragedy, along with dancing in skimpy or nonexistent clothing and throwing a couple of powerful punches. Playing Anora called for both an emotionally rich inner life and a breathtakingly kinetic physicality, all poured into a character about whom people form opinions the moment they meet her. And at every moment, Madison is mesmerizing.The movie is also a star maker for Baker, whose earlier films, like “The Florida Project” and “Red Rocket,” have earned accolades and devoted audiences. With “Anora,” though, he has leveled up. (The film won the coveted Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival in May.)Baker is known for making movies about people on society’s margins, frequently sex workers. But this film, which Baker directed, wrote and edited, is steadier and more confident than his previous work. In some ways “Anora” has the most in common with Baker’s 2015 film, “Tangerine,” a screwball comedy about transgender sex workers in Los Angeles, shot on iPhones. But it also feels like a significant evolution in his style, and makes me excited to see what he does next.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More
- in Movies
Festival Winners Crowd New York Film Festival Main Slate Lineup
Top titles from Cannes and Berlin, like Sean Baker’s “Anora” and Mati Diop’s “Dahomey,” join new work by Pedro Almodóvar, Steve McQueen and RaMell Ross.This fall’s New York Film Festival will feature celebrated prizewinners from Cannes and the Berlinale, organizers announced Tuesday, unveiling a main slate that will join new works from the filmmakers Pedro Almodóvar, Steve McQueen and RaMell Ross.The festival, which runs Sept. 27 to Oct. 14, will screen films from 24 countries and include two world premieres, five North American premieres and 17 American premieres.Ross’s film, “The Nickel Boys,” is an adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 2019 novel about two Black teenagers in a Jim Crow-era Florida reform school. It’s the opening-night selection. Almodóvar’s “The Room Next Door,” about a rekindled friendship between women played by Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton, will be the centerpiece. And the festival will close with Steve McQueen’s “Blitz,” starring Saoirse Ronan as a working-class single mother in London who gets separated from her 9-year-old son during World War II.Winners from Cannes and the Berlin Film Festival feature heavily in the festival’s main slate lineup.Cannes imports include the Palme d’Or winner “Anora,” from Sean Baker; the Grand Prix winner “All We Imagine as Light” from Payal Kapadia; best director winner Miguel Gomes’s “Grand Tour”; the two best-director winners from the Un Certain Regard section, Roberto Minervini with “The Damned” and Rungano Nyoni with “On Becoming a Guinea Fowl”; and special prize winner “The Seed of the Sacred Fig” from Mohammad Rasoulof.Berlinale veterans playing in New York include the Golden Bear prizewinner “Dahomey,” a documentary from Mati Diop about the complicated postcolonial legacy of artifacts from the former African kingdom; Philippe Lesage’s Quebecois coming-of-age drama, “Who by Fire”; and the documentary “No Other Land,” about the destruction of West Bank villages by the Israeli military, made over five years by a Palestinian-Israeli collective.Two festival mainstays, the filmmakers Hong Sang-soo and Wang Bing, will each have two films playing this fall.Hong is bringing “By the Stream,” about a former film director, and “A Traveler’s Needs,” which won the Silver Bear Grand Jury Prize at the Berlinale and stars Isabelle Huppert as an inexperienced French teacher in a Seoul suburb. (Hong also showed two films last year.)The second and third parts of Wang’s observational nonfiction “Youth” trilogy, titled “Youth (Hard Times)” and “Youth (Homecoming)” and focused on migrant textile workers in the Chinese district of Zhili, will also screen at the festival. The first part of the trilogy, “Youth (Spring),” was included in last year’s lineup.“The most notable thing about the films in the main slate — and in the other sections that we will announce in the coming weeks — is the degree to which they emphasize cinema’s relationship to reality,” the festival’s artistic director Dennis Lim said in a news release. “They are reminders that, in the hands of its most vital practitioners, film has the capacity to reckon with, intervene in and reimagine the world.” More
- in Movies
Sean Baker’s ‘Anora’ Wins Palme d’Or at Cannes Film Festival
The movie about a sex worker, from the American filmmaker Sean Baker, took the top prize at a ceremony that also honored George Lucas.The Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival was awarded on Saturday to “Anora,” a giddily ribald picaresque from the American director Sean Baker about a sex worker who marries the son of a Russian oligarch — and things get very messy.A critical favorite, “Anora” takes a nonjudgmental attitude toward its protagonist, played by Mikey Madison in a go-for-broke breakthrough performance that critics have praised. George Lucas, who received an honorary award at the ceremony, presented the Palme d’Or. Baker hugged Lucas and thanked the jury before blurting out, “I really don’t know what’s happening now.” He dedicated his award to “sex workers past, present and future — this is for you.”The ceremony, which took place in the Grand Lumière Theater in the festival’s headquarters, opened with a spoof of the opening crawl of the original “Star Wars.” When Lucas eventually took the stage, he received a thunderous standing ovation. The applause grew even louder when Lucas’s longtime close friend Francis Ford Coppola appeared to present Lucas with an honorary Palme d’Or. Coppola, who referred to Lucas as his “kid brother,” was at the festival with his epic “Megalopolis,” which screened in the main competition and did not win anything.The competition jury, led by Greta Gerwig, gave a special award to the gripping Iranian tragedy “The Seed of the Sacred Fig,” about a small family that comes violently undone just as the Women, Life, Freedom protest movement in Iran is igniting. The director, Mohammad Rasoulof, who fled the country right before the festival opened, accepted the award in person. On May 13, he announced on Instagram that he had left Iran after being sentenced to eight years in prison for his movies; he was also to be fined and whipped, and have property confiscated.The Grand Prix, the festival’s second-highest honor, was given to “All We Imagine as Light,” from the Indian director Payal Kapadia. A gentle drama about three women coming to terms with one another and their own desires in contemporary Mumbai, “All We Imagine as Light” was another critical favorite. In Kapadia’s acceptance speech, she thanked the three leading actresses, whom she brought onstage with her, as well as all of the workers who make the festival run.Mikey Madison in a scene from “Anora.”Neon, via Associated PressWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More
- in Movies
The Cannes Love Affair With American Cinema Takes Unexpected Turns
Whether it’s Demi Moore’s performance in “The Substance” or Sean Baker’s tale of a Brooklyn sex worker, this year’s jury will have a lot to ponder.One truism of the Cannes Film Festival is that no matter how alarming the news about the American movie world, Hollywood — however you understand that word — retains a powerful grip on this event. Cannes is a thoroughly French affair, but its love for le cinéma américain is evident everywhere from the faded images of Hollywood stars that are scattered about to the honorary awards that the event bestows. On Saturday, it will present an honorary Palme d’Or to George Lucas, the 11th American to get an award that it’s given out just 22 times.Given the United States’ long domination of the international film market, it’s no surprise that the country looms large here. The Disney adventure “Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes,” it is worth pointing out, was No. 1 at the box office in France and in much of the rest of the world when Cannes opened last week; it still is. That said, the hold that American cinema maintains on this festival goes beyond market share. Americans have also won more top awards at Cannes than filmmakers from Britain, Italy or France. This fact that reminds me of the moment in “Kings of the Road,” the 1976 Wim Wenders road movie, when a character says, “The Yanks have colonized our subconscious.”There are always movies from around the world here, of course, but the selections that often generate the loudest chatter are either from the United States or are Hollywood-adjacent. Three such titles this year are a heat-seeking troika that involve American notables who, after a period of relative domestic quiet, have showily returned to the international stage. Kevin Costner is here with “Horizon: An American Saga,” a baggy western that’s the first chapter in a multipart series, and Francis Ford Coppola has a new epic, “Megalopolis.” Then there’s Demi Moore, who’s being hailed for her bold starring role in “The Substance,” an English-language horror movie from the French director Coralie Fargeat.Demi Moore as an actress of “a certain age” in “The Substance.” Universal PicturesA gross-out fantasy that suggests Fargeat has watched her share of David Cronenberg movies, “The Substance” centers on a beautiful actress, Elisabeth Sparkle (Moore), who is what’s often irritatingly called a certain age. When her TV show is canceled, the actress does what you might predict given the movie’s exaggerated look and tone: She despairs at what she sees in the mirror and reaches for an outrageous solution. This turns out to be the mysterious treatment of the title, which allows her to effectively generate (birth) a younger version of herself. This Demi 2.0, as it were, is played by Margaret Qualley, who, like Moore, bares her all in a 140-minute movie that’s as simple-minded as it is bloated.I am (personally!) sympathetic to the points about women, beauty and age that Fargeat seems to be trying to make. Yet the movie never gets beyond the obvious, and the whole thing soon becomes grindingly repetitive despite its two vigorous lead performances, all the many eye-catching shots of Qualley pumping her butt like a piston and the chunky tsunamis of gore. Far more successful on both feminist and filmmaking terms is “Anora,” Sean Baker’s giddily ribald picaresque about a Brooklyn sex worker, Ani (Mikey Madison), who, more or less impulsively, weds the absurdly juvenile son of a Russian oligarch.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More
