ANORA** - BFI London Film Festival 2024 - Day 7

Hhhmmmmm ANORA.  I think the problem is that it’s two films - an hilarious crime caper - and then a serious drama about a damaged woman who struggles to recognise love - but the first undercuts the second. So we get what is meant to be an emotional breakdown and breakthrough at the end. But we’ve had to slog through Wacky Races to get there.

The film stars Mikey Madison as Anora, a stripper living in the heavily ethnically Russian Brighton Beach area of New York. She picks up a feckless son of an Oligarch who pays her handsomely and then drunkenly decides to marry her so that he can avoid going back to Russia. Both Anora and Vanya are delusional.  She wants to think she isn’t a hooker and that it’s a real marriage so that she can escape her working class life. He knows full well his parents won’t let the marriage stand and frankly I am amazed they didn’t just shoot Anora and take him home.

Instead, what we get is a comedy caper in which Anora and Vanya’s family’s goons try to hunt down the errant boy so that they can get an annulment before the parents arrive from Russia. It’s full of genuinely funny physical comedy but goes on way too long. And then the aforementioned handbreak turn back into serious heartbreak. 

That final scene is what I wanted from ANORA - and what I never really got.  And it made me wonder if writer-director Sean Baker actually cared about the character.  Because she really is rather thinly drawn as a superficial, foul-mouthed desperate gold-digger for ninety percent of the film.  I was watching an actress who I knew could do more being constrained by the ditzy genre format.  And let’s be frank - all the women in this film are thinly drawn cliches - the bitch gangster wife, the bitch hooker, the bitch rival stripper.  Isn’t that just a tad misogynistic?

Which brings me to this year’s Cannes jury awarding this film the Palme D’Or and EMILIA PEREZ the Jury Prize. Both are superficially female-centred films but neither gives us a three-dimensional credible portrait of a woman.  Maybe we need more female writer-directors for that. 

ANORA is rated R and has a running time of 139 minutes.  It played Toronto, Telluride and London 2024. It opens in the USA on October 18th and in the UK on November 1st.

THE FLORIDA PROJECT - Day 11 - BFI London Film Festival 2017

THE FLORIDA PROJECT is a beautifully shot and acted social drama that's a rightly tough watch.  It tells the tale of three kids living hand-to-mouth in motels in Orlando, a stone's throw from Disneyworld and yet a world away from rich kids being indulged.  The star of the film is Brooklyn Kimberly Prince, who plays a young girl called Moonee.  She's very precocious and full of attitude that she's learned from her young and damaged mother Halley (Bria Vinaite).  Halley barely has enough money to buy food but somehow has money for cigarettes. She so feckless with money that when she has it she wastes it and then turns tricks to get more.  It's hard not to hate her, but then you realise that she probably experienced as dysfunctional a childhood as her daughter is currently experiencing.

So what we get in this film is a two-hour portrait of an unfit mother and I spent most of the film inwardly anxious that her kid should be lifted out of this and into care. And that offset what I think was meant to be an enjoyable portrait of kids getting up to capers - scamming people for free ice cream and whatnot in a jaunty comedy.  I was just too angered by the social trauma to be amused.  I also found that Moonee's antics started to grate. I'll freely admit that this is a highly subjective criticism, but I'm not used to having small kids around and I just found her behaviour deeply annoying. In fact, for me the most memorable and affecting performance in the film was Willem Dafoe's motel manager who exhibits common sense and humanity in a performance against type and worthy of awards recognition. I also think the heightened saturated colour and cinematography is some of the most memorable of this festival.

THE FLORIDA PROJECT has a running time of 115 minutes and is rated R.