Not Exactly "Pretty Woman."

A good new movie by a filmmaker who should be more famous.

For quite a few years now, I’ve been confused when young people tell me they want to write screenplays. I wonder what kind of movies they want to write. Marvel Comic Universe movies? Why? Most big-budget studio films already seem like they’re written by artificial intelligence programs.

Of course, people are still making small independent films, and the company called A24 is still turning out interesting movies. The problem is, with so much material available on the streaming services – much of it not very memorable – and no reliable critical consensus, how do those of us who grew up on the edgier fare of the 70s figure out what’s worth watching?

That’s why I’m recommending Sean Baker’s film Anora, which won the Palme D’Or at the Cannes Film Festival this year. It tells the story of Ani, a not-so-pure-hearted stripper from Brooklyn, who meets a wealthy Russian boy and agrees to be his girlfriend for a week’s pay of $15,000.

But if you’re looking for Pretty Woman part II, boy have you come to the wrong place! Anora is a much wilder and woolier affair. It’s far more sexually explicit than any studio movie has been since the 70s. But to my eye it’s also funnier, more unpredictable, and ultimately more tenderhearted than any movie Julia Roberts was ever in.

The cast includes nobody you’ve ever heard of, except perhaps the young actress Mikey Madison who plays the title role and was previously one of the Manson family psychos in Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon A Time in Hollywood as well as being a regular on the FX series Better Things.

For years, I’ve been privately lamenting the way mainstream films and TV pretend to be daring while showing consistently showing actors wearing sports bras and underwear during sex scenes. But between this film and Emma Stone’s performance in Poor Things, those concerns have been addressed for the next generation or two. Mikey Madison holds nothing back in Anora, but it’s not just her body that’s uncovered. She plays every scene – including the fight scenes - with an explicit physical and emotional vulnerability that makes you care for a character who does coarse, vulgar things without being entirely coarse and vulgar herself.

“Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid,” Raymond Chandler wrote eighty years ago. It’s a trick that only the best actors and writers can pull off – committing to a certain kind of realism while stepping back just enough to let the audience walk on the path with you. In a now-infamous scene from Tropic Thunder, Robert Downey Jr. in blackface explains the distinction between “going the full retard” in a performance and winning an Oscar. Mikey Madison skillfully splits the difference, allowing the viewer to care about Ani without forgetting the down-and-dirty things she does to get by.

I guess another word for this is “empathy.” And in the eight films he’s written and directed so far, Sean Baker has proven himself to be pretty good at it. He consistently focuses on characters struggling to survive on the margins of society, often in the sex trade, and never stints on the humanity. Anora isn’t as poignant or wrenching as his 2017 film The Florida Project, which had Willem Dafoe in a support role and a heartbreaking performance by a child actress named Brooklynn Kimberly Prince.

Some of the more absurd scenes in Anora are closer in spirit to Baker’s earlier work on TV shows like Greg The Bunny and my personal favorite, Warren the Ape (check out this clip of Warren in Las Vegas):

I don’t know much about Baker. His online biography says he was born in Summit, New Jersey and studied film at NYU. Clearly, he’s not a direct product or part of the worlds he makes movies about. But the compassion and eye for detail that he brings to his narratives are the opposite of voyeurism. There’s been a fixation for a while in publishing and the entertainment business on only allowing “authentic representatives” to tell certain stories. Anora shows what can happen when you let go of those strictures.

One last word for a sometime-reader of this column. I’m recommending Anora, which is only in theaters now, to most readers here (it will be available for streaming in the spring of 2025). But Mom, you might want to skip this one.