On Anora – Michael Wood in LRB:

“In a recent interview Sean Baker said he likes to resist purely ‘grey and drab’ moments in life or movies. ‘Even when I’m going through hard times, I still see colour.’ This is literally true of the palette of his films and especially of the scenes at Brighton Beach and Coney Island in his new movie, Anora, which won the Palme d’Or at Cannes this year. It is perhaps even more true metaphorically. Grim, difficult lives look like one long party, at least for a while and onscreen, a matter of booze and pot and shrieking laughter. The claim also helps us to understand another of Baker’s remarks. The first hour of the film, he says, belongs to the genre of romantic comedy. This makes interesting sense if we are ready to reconsider the meanings of romance and comedy.
Ani (Mikey Madison) is a lap dancer at a club in Manhattan. Just in case we don’t know what her job entails, we get an extended portrait of her work as the opening credits roll. A row of men lie back in armchairs while a series of naked women, including Ani, clamber over them. The men seem more baffled than satisfied, and it can hardly be an accident that they look like a movie audience whose vision is somehow impeded.”

(…)

“What’s romantic here is a shared feeling of attachment, whatever its basis, and what’s comic is the absence of any sense of what is to come.”

(…)

“Ivan, now sober, is not going to question the annulment or defend Ani’s rights. He will do as he is told and do it in Russia. Toros arranges some compensation for her, which she accepts but doesn’t really think about, and she flies back to New York to spend a last night in the mansion, watched over by Igor. Throughout the film he has played the nice guy among the bad guys. I’m not sure Baker believes this role exists outside of the movies, but it certainly matches his repeatedly offered idea, present in his earlier films and in his conversations, that work we are supposed to disapprove of, like lap dancing or organised crime, is still work and deserves some sort of respect. Ani ought to be on Baker’s side in this debate, but her sense of herself at the end of the story, before Igor drops her off at her old home in Brighton Beach, is entirely bleak, devoid of colour, as if her life will notionally continue but is really over. What has happened? Where has she been?”

Read the article here.

I saw the movie and romantic comedy were not the first words that would come to my mind.

I did think, what would have Pasolini done with this material?

He would have made more of the church scene, for those of you haven’t seen the movie, go and see it. It’s definitely, how shall I put it, weird, worth seeing.

A few decades after Paul Verhoeven’s Showgirls, which won, I believe, an award for worst movie, and no it wasn’t that bad, the sex worker makes a comeback in the movies, a decent comeback. More self-assured, more autonomous, but in the end, alas, the sex worker cannot be a winner, to use this word that is so loved by the empire and its satellites and by many other cultures.

We might want to destigmatize sex work, but most parents will say, “I prefer the grocery store for my children.”

And to be honest, so do I. Even though I always wanted to be a gigolo.