Sean Baker's 'Anora' featuring Armenian actors gets Cannes standing ovation
Sean Baker’s “Anora ” which stars Karren Karagulian and Vache Tovmasyan, premiered in Competition at the Cannes Film Festival and received a seven and a half minute standing ovation on Tuesday, the Armenian Film Society reported.
Karren Karagulian, who is a regular in Sean Baker’s films, plays Toros, while Vache Tovmasyan plays Garnick. The film is being described as an “outrageous sex worker dramedy” in which Mikey Madison gives an “all-time performance that pivots into UNCUT GEMS territory.
Indiewire calls Karren Karagulian “a dead ringer for Robert De Niro whose anxious presence helps to enhance the movie’s 35mm New Hollywood Cinema energy.”
The uncut gem of this year’s Cannes competition, “Anora” is a rowdy Safdie-style movie about two cultures (Russian and American), two languages (Russian and English) and two currencies (money and sex), Variety reports.
Like countless Hollywood fantasies that have come before, it tells the story of how young people from different worlds fall in love, run into immediate obstacles and deal with the consequences — except the couple in this case consists of a New York stripper and the reckless son of a Russian oligarch. How long would you give it?
Director Sean Baker describes “Anora” as a Cinderella story, but that’s only true to the extent that his Walt Disney World-adjacent “The Florida Project” could be seen as a fairy tale. Baker’s subversively romantic, free-wheeling sex farce makes “Pretty Woman” look like a Disney movie. It follows on the (knee-high boot) heels of four other films in which Baker centered the experience of sex workers — from porn stars to prostitutes — and refashions their best aspects into a compulsively entertaining, 80-proof emotional ride. The movie’s heart may be in Brighton Beach, but its spirit is more in line with the rickety Coney Island Cyclone just down the boardwalk.
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