A sex worker's dizzying journey

   

 I’ve been reading about Anora ever since the movie won the Palm d'Or at this year’s Cannes Film Festival and began catapulting its way around the festival circuit. My initial anticipation was sparked not only by an award but by the movie’s pedigree. Anora is the work of Sean Baker,  a director whose The Florida Project I admired for its specificity and down-to-earth credibility. 

  Baker’s interests tend to be married to narrow forms of realism that resonate beyond each movie’s carefully chosen setting. His movies are about specific places -- Los Angeles in Tangerine -- but they're also about characters who struggle with chaotic forms of living -- the transgender sex worker in the same movie.

     In Anora, Baker immerses himself in Brighton Beach, a Brooklyn enclave defined by its community of Russian emigres and business people. If that description makes it sound as if Baker plans to chart an inspirational course through immigration issues,  think again.

    Baker builds his movie around an American-born woman who works in a nightclub that specializes in lap dances, some held in private VIP rooms.

    In what rightly has been described as a breakthrough performance, Mikey Madison plays Anora, a woman who’d like to escape the sex-worker grind. Ambition aside, Anora does her job with convincing enthusiasm. She’s not embarrassed by her work and has learned how to sell herself.

     The story’s pivotal event occurs when Anora meets Ivan (Mark Eydelshteyn), a 21-year-old Russian club patron who’s goofy and  immature. As it turns out, Ivan is also the son of a powerful Russian oligarch. Happy to pay for sex, he’s so taken with Anora — who calls herself Ani — that he offers to pay her $15,000 to spend a week him. They’ll party, take drugs, have sex, and party some more.

      Ably created by Eydelshteyn as a kid who's nothing but loose ends, Ivan lives in a beautifully appointed modern home in a gated community. His ocean view offers a stark contrast to Ani’s apartment. She and her sister share a dingy flat next to subway tracks where trains rumble their insult past smudged windows. Ani needs the money, does her sex duties willingly, and enjoys her new exposure to the high life. 

      Early on, the movie feels like a giddy party that includes a major bash at Ivan’s home, trips to upscale clubs, romps on the beaches of Coney Island, and a stay at a luxurious Las Vegas hotel where Ivan is a regular customer. The characters take a deep dive into what seems to be an inexhaustible supply of drugs. 

       We're not sure what to make of it when Ivan proposes and the couple hurries through a Las Vegas wedding. Suddenly, Ani is living the dream, much to the envy of at least one of her former co-workers.

       We wait for the fall of the other shoe, the hard kick that will shatter Ani’s dreams, but Baker is too shrewd to crash the gates of formula. Instead, he turns Anora into a near-hysterical comedy, bringing a farcical tone to the increasingly wild proceedings.

     A time bomb ticks beneath the story’s surface. Ivan’s disapproving parents are about to arrive in New York to nullify their notoriously irresponsible son's marriage.  

     Enter a cohort of subservient family employees who, with Ani in tow, must locate the fleeing Ivan. He runs off without Ani at the suggestion that he’s about to be transported back to Russia. Sans Ivan, there can be no annulment.

       Included in this gaggle are an Armenian (Karen Karagulian) who works as the loyal family fixer and two henchmen (Vache Tovmasyan and Yura Borisov).  Hired as the muscle of the group, Borisov's Igor has a disarming soulful quality that throws us off guard.

       The Brighton bumblers fail to take Ani’s toughness into account. A scene in Ivan’s apartment turns into an explosive comic brawl in which Ani holds her own. Baker allows the scene to play out as the mayhem spirals out of control. 

        Eventually, Ivan’s father (Aleksey Serebryakov) and mother (Daryl Ekamasova) arrive in New York to retrieve their wayward son. Ivan's no-nonsense, steely mom makes no bones about asserting her authority. Ani isn't impressed. 

       Madison handles her role with bold confidence. She ignites sparks of humanity that keep Ani from becoming a caricature, and Baker continues his exploration of boisterous nihilistic situations that resist easy compartmentalization.

       Anora brings us into a tipsy, fascinating, ethnically specific world where Brooklyn funk and obscene amounts of money create an intoxicating mix that can be funny, bitter, and impressively true to itself. 

     

He fights to be a father

Menashe, a Yiddish-language film, tells the story of a widower whose relationship with his son is threatened.

Menashe, the main character in the movie of the same name, lives in Borough Park, Brooklyn. As a member of a Hassidic sect, Menashe tries to adhere to the letter of Jewish law.

Not a man of worldly ambition, Menashe earns his living working the cash register at a local grocery store. Menashe speaks mostly Yiddish and the subtitled movie about him -- directed by Joshua Z. Weinstein -- makes room for only a smattering of English.

Those unfamiliar with Hassidic life may find Menashe as foreign as if it were taking place in another country. We're in the US, but Menashe immerses us in a culturally isolated community made up only of Hassidic Jews.

That doesn't mean that Menashe's story fails to strike a few universal cords. A widower, Menashe has been told that can't keep his son Rieven (Ruben Niborski) unless he remarries. Menashe's rabbi (Meyer Schwarz) has ruled that every child must grow up in a two-parent household. The
complication: Menashe has no desire to submit to another arranged marriage.

As a result, Rieven lives with his stern uncle (Yoel Weisshaus), a man who's married, has his own family and views Menashe as incurably irresponsible.

Menashe Lustig, a bearish man whose story inspired Weinstein's screenplay, portrays the title character in a movie that has been cast with non-actors who appear to be deeply embedded in the world that Weinstein apparently had to film on the sly so that he did not run afoul of the Brooklyn-based community where the story takes place.

You'd think that our sympathies automatically would go to Menashe. But Weinstein makes it clear that Menashe doesn't really know how to raise a child -- even as he shows the father's love for the boy and the boy's love for his father.

As played by Niborksi, Rieven comes across as a smart kid who, at times, understands that his father might be in over his head.

The movie includes a wonderful scene in which Menashe shares beers with two Puerto Rican co-workers during a break from work. He also shares the story of his less-than-happy marriage. Honest and relaxed with these strangers, Menashe unburdens himself in English. His companions tell him that without a wife, he's free to do what he pleases, analysis that couldn't be further from Menashe's truth.

This lovely, human scene reminds us that there's life beyond Borough Park, even if Menashe and every other character in the film have no pressing desire to interact with it.

The first year anniversary of the death of Menashe's wife drives the story over the course of a single week. Despite his brother-in-law's objections, Menashe insists on holding the memorial service in his cramped apartment. He wants to prove to his brother-in-law, to the rabbi and to the community at large that he's capable. To the movie's credit, we're not convinced that Menashe is up to the task. He may not believe it, either.

Weinstein leaves it up to us to decide what to make of the lives he so richly evokes in a movie that qualifies -- on the basis of language alone -- as one of the year's more unusual offerings. It has been a long time since I've heard this much Yiddish, the language with which my grandparents were most comfortable and which my parents spoke when they didn't want either myself or my brother to know what they were talking about -- or when English simply couldn't match the richly sardonic capabilities of Yiddish.

Language aside, Weinstein's Menashe succeeds in doing what many good films do; it opens the door to a world most of us don't really know and allows us to meet the characters in it on their own terms. Nice work.

A beautifully acted 'Brooklyn'

Saoirse Ronan plays a young woman who learns to claim her destiny.

Eilis Lacey spends a good deal of Brooklyn, the movie derived from a 2009 novel by Colm Toibin, in a disoriented state. A girl from Enniscorthy, County Wexford, Eilis travels to the U.S. in 1951 after her older sister Rose arranges for her to leave Ireland.

Eilis makes the trip, but it is not yet her journey. And that's the basis of a coming-of-age movie that embraces an old-fashioned style that files the roughest edges off its story, but allows its central performance to carry us along with it.

Brooklyn focuses on young Eilis, beautifully played by Saoirse Ronan, familiar to moviegoers from movies such Atonement, The Lovely Bones and Hanna.

Ronan inhabits her character so thoroughly, it seems as if we're watching a flower break ground, stretch to meet the sun's warmth and eventually bloom. Without affectation or undue showiness, Ronan manages to carry a movie that spans the distance between two very different worlds.

When Eilis arrives in the U.S., she takes up residence in a boarding house run by Mrs. Keough (Julie Walters), a good-hearted woman who also happens to have a dictatorial streak when it comes to the women who live in her home.

Gradually, Eilis begins to encounter the new life into which she has been thrust. She's helped by a local priest who cares about her welfare and who is portrayed by Jim Broadbent without a trace of cynicism.

Eventually, Eilis lands a job as a clerk at a department store and begins studying accounting. She also meets Tony, (Emory Cohen) a young Italian man who works as a plumber, but who -- along with his bothers -- hopes to start a construction business that will relocate his family to Long Island.

As the story develops, Ronan begins to taste the freedom and sense of possibility that her sister (Fiona Glascott) so ardently wishes for her. She even learns to hold her own at the table with other women who board with Mrs. Keough.

Eventually, Eilis learns that Rose has passed away. Before Eilis returns to Ireland to comfort her grieving mother, Tony insists that they marry. He wants to make sure that she'll come back to him.

Eilis agrees, but we don't know exactly how committed she is to this marriage; she's still living her sister's dream, not her own.

Back in Ireland, Eilis begins to see a side of life she never experienced while growing up.

Instead of the world narrowing, it suddenly seems to be opening. Not knowing that Eilis is married, one of the town's bachelors (Domhnall Gleeson) begins to pursue her. She lands a part-time job, and comforts a mother who has known her share of grief.

Obviously, Eilis eventually must make up her mind about whether to remain in Ireland or return to the U.S. and resume the life that seemed to offer her so much.

Director John Crowley must have sensed that Ronan could keep the movie on track, so he supports her with nostalgic period design and allows the story to unfold without undue fuss. Nick Hornby's script is both economical and respectful of its characters.

Well-cast and nicely appointed, Brooklyn might be one of the least cynical movies of the year, an engagingly wide-eyed look at a world in which a young woman learns that she has something to say about the way her life will unfold.

The movie's modesty and Ronan's lovely performance make it a pleasure to watch.