The son of a Russian oligarch falls in love with a stripper in New York. “Anora”, a very successful comedy, is one of the 22 films in the running for the Palme d’Or which will be awarded on Saturday May 25 at the Cannes Film Festival. American director Sean Baker, born in 1971 in New York, makes fun of the ultra-rich Russian milieu to celebrate the insolence and intelligence of rejected and poor people.
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RFI : Your film is called Anora, but she herself calls herself “Ani”. Is the main point of the story, how does Ani (masterfully played by Mikey Madison) become Anora ?
Sean Baker : I don’t know if that’s the main point, but the movie is really about identity, how people perceive themselves and how Anora perceives herself and who she chooses to be. That’s what’s almost part of his job, to be different people. I used that and also used the fact that she doesn’t like her real name, Anora, to show her character development. She is far removed from her Russian heritage, but by the end of the film she uses her first name Anora and feels perceived as Anora. It’s a way of showing us the evolution of how she accepts who she is.
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RFI : It’s the love story between Ani and Ivan (Mark Eidelstein plays this degenerate offspring wonderfully), between a very hardworking, but poor, stripper in a nightclub in New York, and Ivan, son of Russian billionaires, as rotten as he is spoiled. Is this a story Pretty Woman ?
It is very funny. I didn’t realize there were similarities with Pretty Woman [film de Garry Marshall avec Julia Roberts et Richard Gere, NDLR], until I was in post-production and someone told me. I haven’t seen the film since 1988, so I don’t know if it had an influence. I think it’s just my interpretation of the Cinderella story. This is my way of seeing this story in the world we live in. She marries to earn money. That’s where the similarities come from. But I like the comparison.
Anora shows young people as a generation without values, which does not want to work, does not think about the family, but only about partying… On the other hand, we can also see your film as a sort of trial of the parents’ generation . It’s mostly this generation that frequents this strip club. And Ivan’s Russian parents’ billions of dollars appear to have come from criminal activity.
I think it’s about the perception that each generation has of the other generation. The younger generation considers their parents old. And the parents’ generation looks down on the young people from above. But I also try to break that perception, because Ani works a lot. She has a work ethic and she does her job very well. And I try to show it. So, it’s really a question of each individual. I’m not trying to make a blanket statement about a generation, but rather about how people perceive each other.
Why does the story have to take place in a New York strip club and not some other working class ? Why does it have to be Russian billionaires and not American billionaires ?
Well, because Karren Karagulian [qui joue dans le film le prêtre au service des mafieux russes] and I both wanted to tell a story about the Russian community of Coney Island, Brighton Beach [Brooklyn, New York], for over 15 years. The project started from there. The film was originally intended to be a gangster film where a young woman marries a member of a mafia family. But I don’t know this world very well. So I thought it would be interesting if she married someone from a wealthy family. And since this is a Russian community, there must be a son of a Russian oligarch hanging around somewhere [rires]. From there came the idea.
Igor (Yuri Borissov embodies the quiet, introverted strength of the film) is supposed to be a “ killer » in the service of the Russian mafia. But he turns out to be the nicest of all. It is he who will reconcile Ani with her first name Anora. And her values of respect, friendship and love come from her grandmother. So the generation of grandmothers has something to tell us in your film ?
Maybe. I address several themes in the film. One of them is the question of what defines being an adult and having maturity. There are people who grow and others who don’t. This is where I was going with this.