For a film to become popular culture is not so easy. Few achieve it. pretty woman is one of them. Garry Marshall’s 1990 film, titled after the Roy Orbison song that the film itself would make fashionable again, was nothing more than a reformulation of the Cinderella story with a touch that in the 90s was considered modern. Here, the poor stepsister condemned to do housework until she finds a prince charming was replaced by a prostitute with the charisma of Julia Roberts, and the whore prince had the features of Richard Gere.
As in the story, the film was an idealization of romantic relationships and, mainly, how a poor woman only had one chance to get ahead: find a rich partner. There was something pernicious in Cinderella that in pretty woman it multiplied. No one can ask a story for class consciousness, but in the film it is not that there was none, but rather that the parallel was established between the savior prince and the rich businessman who took his lover out of prostitution.
34 years have passed, and it took filmmaker Sean Baker, whose career has been based on looking at the margins of US society, to turn it around. The director of films like Red Rocket, The Florida project either Tangerine has remained coherent in his career and has offered the reverse of pretty woman in Anoraa frenetic romantic anti-comedy that turns the story on its head. But as always in him, without miserabilism, with humor and giving dignity to all his characters.
Baker will never use the word prostitute to refer to her character when talking about him, but instead Anora who gives the film its name is a sex worker like all those who inhabit his cinema. He dedicated the Palme d’Or to them that he won with this film, which after winning at the most prestigious festival in the world reaches the first stage of the awards race as one of the favorites to triumph. At least in the Oscar nominations, where Baker can achieve his first nomination and where his protagonist, an imposing Mikey Madison, should be without a problem.
For a seasoned director raised in indie, this success is “a change of life,” and Sean Baker himself recognizes it. Winning the Palme d’Or was “a dream come true.” “It’s like now the second part of my life begins. It’s a kind of existential crisis. I think this will allow me to continue making these types of films the way I want to make them but with fewer restrictions and less resistance. So it’s a great thing, especially now that independent films are increasingly difficult to make,” he explains and makes it clear that he is not afraid of being tempted by the industry: “I’ve already been there, and now this has consolidated me . “Now I have to make sure I can pursue my vision.”
Anora has had the largest budget of his career, but it is still small compared to what a Hollywood film costs. That margin has made the film “feel a little bigger.” But he believes that the success of the film lies in the fact that “it plays with the classic tropes of a romantic comedy, and that is a very conventional genre.” “People recognize the codes of this film, and that is hooking them. The first hour is the Cinderella story, we have already seen it, but I do it with a twist,” he says of the success of his eighth film. That is why he is happy that success has come now and not before, because he does not know if before he would have been able to manage it in the same way: “I am at an age where I am more secure, I have more confidence and I do not I’m going to let myself be seduced. The industry could have easily seduced me in the past, not now.”
I am at an age where I am more secure, I have more confidence and I am not going to let myself be seduced. The industry could have easily seduced me in the past, not now
Sean Baker
— Filmmaker
Once again, sex workers are the protagonists of the film, in this case Anora, who will have a fleeting relationship with the son of a Russian oligarch. And as always in his cinema, the key is not to judge them and dignify them. “Obviously, I could have made this much darker and more miserable,” he confesses, but argues that one of the reasons why he didn’t opt for that tone was to hook people and entertain them before hitting him – and there that heartbreaking final scene. But the turn of Anora is that it is the class difference and the power relations between the characters that mark everything.
There is, once again in Sean Baker, a brutal x-ray of the United States, and although the question of class is important, he also emphasizes that he believes that the way in which Anora is treated also has to do “with the lack of respect there is for the sex work all over the world. “Ivan’s parents’ attitude is what almost all normal parents would have. I try not to judge my characters, and I know it’s hard not to judge Ivan for what he does to Anora, for his lack of empathy. That, which is my greatest judgment as a narrator, is in terms of class struggle. In the film I address power dynamics and hierarchies in the US and around the world, and that always has to do with class and was intentional,” says Baker, who acknowledges that it is difficult for him to say that his films are political even though they are because saw how the conservatives tried to appropriate the speech of The Florida Project. “Obviously they are political because we all have an ideology. Let’s say that my political ideas are in my films, you just have to dig them out,” he adds.
During his time at the San Sebastián Festival, Baker claimed Almodóvar as a “direct influence on his cinema,” but he also demonstrated his knowledge of other more unknown names such as Eloy de la Iglesia and Jess Franco, of whom he highlighted his “sensitivity.” independent”, his “endearing careless production” and “how he photographed his muses, especially Soledad Miranda, whose image with a red scarf has a direct link with Anora”.
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