Thirteen years after Terrence Malick’s “The Tree of Life”, Sean Baker became the first American director to win the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival with “Anora”. Here’s what you need to know about this very successful film.
And the 2024 Palme d’Or is awarded to… Anora. For the love of taste and good films, Greta Gerwig and her jury have chosen to award the supreme prize to the new feature film by Sean Baker, who today becomes more than the leader of the independent branch of American cinema.
He succeeds Justine Triet and her Anatomy of a Fall, and becomes the first American winner since Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life. Here’s what you need to know about this feature film which won over the jury of the 2024 Cannes Film Festival thanks to its humor, the emotions it takes us through and its way of breaking our hearts as much as making us hope.
Release date: when is Anora released?
The feature film does not yet have a release date. But he has a French distributor, Le Pacte, who already had… Anatomy of a Fall. There is no doubt that a slot will be quickly chosen and announced. In the fall, to allow Sean Baker to make another detour to the Deauville Festival that he knows well?
What does it talk about ?
The journey of a sex worker between New York and Las Vegas. And his relationship with the son of a Russian oligarch.
The director: but who is Sean Baker?
Now aged 53 (which he absolutely does not look like), Sean Baker is the author of six feature films. Of which only three were released in our cinemas (while waiting for Anora): Tangerine, a ball of energy shot on the iPhone and which began to attract the attention of French film buffs; The Florida Project, which earned him his first participation in Cannes, at the Quinzaine des Cinéastes; and Red Rocket, with which he made his competitive debut in 2021.
If Willem Dafoe was in The Florida Project, Sean Baker evolves in American independent cinema, where he develops his two favorite subjects: sex workers, and those left behind across the Atlantic. “My films start from problems, themes, places that I want to cover”he told us, already in Cannes, in 2021. “And I also work in response to what I don’t see enough in film and television in the United States.”
I work in response to what I don’t see enough in cinema and television in the United States.
Moving his camera to a new state with each film he directs, Sean Baker has depicted transsexual prostitutes (Tangerine), a porn actor in decline (Red Rocket) or a stripper (Anora).
Without ever judging his characters, very well written, working around the notions of sexuality and the male gaze (or “male gauze”) and by building bridges between its different opuses, which take place in the same universe. So let’s be attentive when you see Anora, because a nod to Red Rocket is hidden there in a more or less obvious way.
Admirer of Francis Ford Coppola and David Cronenberg, opposed to him in the Cannes Competition in 2024, Sean Baker became the latest winner of the Palme d’Or. Presented by George Lucas, director who managed to remain independent throughout his career. Like a symbol?
Casting: who plays in Anora?
One of these days we’ll have to look at the casting of Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood. Where we notably met Austin Butler, Margaret Qualley (in Competition this year with Kinds of Kindness and The Substance), Sydney Sweeney, Maya Hawke and even Mikey Madison.
This is also where Sean Baker spotted the actress with jet black hair, before offering her the lead role of Anora in the days following the release of the fifth Scream. “It’s the first time I didn’t have to audition.”tells us the main interested party in Cannes, 24 hours after the official screening during which she set the Croisette on fire.
JACOVIDES-MOREAU / BESTIMAGE
Sean Baker & Mikey Madison
“I’m bothered because I won’t be able to shoot with it anymore since it will cost too much now that Anora is going to make it take off”Sean Baker then tells us about one of the major revelations of this Cannes Film Festival.
Opposite her, the public discovered Russian actor Mark Eydelshteyn, a sort of cross between Vincent Lacoste and Timothée Chalamet, whose clumsy energy sparked many bursts of laughter during the first part of the film.
Finally, if he left Cannes empty-handed in 2021, Sean Baker discovered one of the actors of his next film there: Yuriy Borisov, also Russian, who was on the poster for Compartiment N°6, Grand Prix il three years ago. And that he decided to hire.
Why is it a great Palme d’Or?
In all honesty and despite his immense love rating, many spectators who discovered him at Cannes (the author of his lines included) did not imagine him going so high in a list where it would have been scandalous not to see him at all.
But we had to face the facts: it was one of the rare films to have been able to bring everyone into agreement, within a selection considered disappointing in relation to the promises born at the time of the announcement of the selection. From the first seconds, Anora has played down one of its major cards, namely its euphoric side, which will remain for more than two hours, even when the story becomes more dramatic.
The pact
The many bursts of laughter aroused by the story of this stripper (and the appearance of “All the Things She Said” of tATu in the soundtrack) then only heated up a little more a room which was only waiting for the end credits to offer him the triumph he deserved. Him and his main actress, who does more than burst the screen: she reduces it to confetti and sets it on fire.
Present in all the scenes, and in particular this crazy central sequence about which we will say as little as possible, the actress is not afraid. And she carries on her shoulders this Pretty Woman 2.0 which quickly frees itself from its model to fully fit into the cinema of its author, who also likes to seize the codes of tales to deconstruct the American dream.
Funny, energetic (sometimes too much), melancholy, Anora makes the audience go through various emotions but manages to unite thanks to her coherence and her strong beating heart. And it is gratifying to see that Greta Gerwig and her jury were seduced by such a strong female character.