Sean Baker’s Añora won the Palme d’Or.
Photo: REUTERS.
No one expected such a turn of events, but the Palme d’Or went to Sean Baker’s Añora, an American tragicomedy about the Russians. Anora, or Ani, is the name of the heroine Mikey Madison, a girl with Russian roots, who more or less understands the Russian language and is even able to pronounce something in it. She, but she in general, lives in New York and is a perfect American. And she works as a stripper: every night she performs lap dances for rich men old enough to be her father. But her client unexpectedly turns out to be a young Russian fool Vanya Zakharov (Mark Eidelstein), son of an oligarch. First dancing, then sex, then more sex, then a trip to Las Vegas, and Vanya proposes to Anora: first, the girl is good, and second, an American wife with a green card would not agree. further. Naturally, the stripper agrees, the marriage is instantly registered (this is possible in Las Vegas) and Anora now has a beautiful and expensive ring on her finger. And Vanya’s parents (Alexey Serebryakov and Daria Ekamasova) are horrified that the boy “married a prostitute”: they urgently send several serious Armenian men, plus gopnik Igor (Yura Borisov), to the United States to explain the situation. And the road movie begins with many races.
During the Cannes Film Festival, the Screen Daily website published daily ratings from film critics and, based on them, compiled a rating of all films shown in competition. Three films obtained the best results: “Anora” (3.3 points out of a possible 4), “Everything that seems light to us” by the Indian Payal Kapadia (also 3.3 points) and “The seed of the sacred fig tree” by the Iranian Mohammad Rasoulof (3, 4 points). But for some reason, those same critics didn’t take Sean Baker’s film seriously. Most were absolutely sure that Rasoulof would receive the Palme d’Or. He shot his film almost clandestinely and on May 8 was sentenced in his homeland to eight years in prison, a fine, confiscation of property and flogging (!). He had no choice but to leave Iran or, more simply, to hastily flee the country. On May 24 he appeared in Cannes and was greeted with a thunderous ovation from the audience. After the screening of the film, the applause did not stop for 12 minutes, an absolute record for Cannes 2024. The story of a lawyer appointed judge of the Islamic Revolutionary Court and forced to hand down numerous sentences (including death sentences) at lightning speed every day, without even familiarizing herself with the defendants’ cases, she seemed an obvious winner. It was not like that: the jury, chaired by the director, actress and screenwriter Greta Gerwig (“Barbie”), awarded her only a special prize.
Another possible candidate for the Palme d’Or seemed to be an Indian film: the story of the nurses at a women’s hospital in Mumbai. Her friend, who lost her house in the city after the death of her husband, is forced to leave her job and move to her hometown by the sea. The heroines help her transport her things and during the trip they discover a lot about themselves. By analysts’ logic, director Gerwig should have awarded director Payal Kapadia, especially for a film that was greeted with acclaim and rave reviews. but “All That Looks to Us is Light” received only the second most important Grand Prix.
Another favorite was Emilia Pérez by Jacques Audiard, the story of a ruthless Mexican bandit who becomes a woman. An incredible mix of criminal drama, wild melodrama, crazy comedy and musical finally received two awards: the jury prize and the award for best actress (more precisely, for the four actresses who starred in the film: Adriana Paz, Zoe Saldana, Carla Sofia). Gascón and Selena Gómez). By the way, many believed that Demi Moore would win this category, after her unexpectedly brilliant performance in Coralie Farge’s French film Substance. There she played an elderly actress who has the opportunity to get a young clone double: practically herself, only forty years younger. Of course she turns on this clone and of course things don’t go as well as she planned. A mix of drama, sci-fi black comedy and horror, Substance was one of the most talked about films at Cannes and ultimately won the screenplay award.
Jesse Plemons (the husband, by the way, of Kirsten Dunst, who in recent years has stepped out of his famous wife’s shadow) was named best actor. He starred in Yorgos Lanthimos’ Kind of Kindness, a complex and incredibly long surreal film anthology of three short stories starring the same actors (plus Plemons, Emma Stone and Willem Dafoe). After the show, it became clear that Kindness would not be as successful as Lanthimos’ previous films, the hits The Favorite and The Wretched. But Greta Gerwig couldn’t help but notice Plemons. By the way, she preferred him to Ben Whishaw, who played Eduard Limonov for Kirill Serebrennikov. It was Wishaw that most critics focused on, but the film “Limonov. Ballad,” like all of Serebrennikov’s previous films in the main competition at Cannes, received nothing.
The best director was the Portuguese Miguel Gómez for the experimental and aesthetic “Grand Tour”, a fantasy about an English diplomat who in 1917 abandons his girlfriend on her wedding day and since then hides from her in several exotic places (Burma, Saigon, Manila, Osaka, Shanghai, Tibet…) The girlfriend insistently pursues him, to which the entire second hour of the film is dedicated.
Here, in fact, are all the winners of the main categories. The classics that presented their films in competition were completely left behind: David Cronenberg (“Shroud”), Paul Schrader (“Oh Canada!”), Francis Ford Coppola (“Megalopolis”). And Paolo Sorrentino for his “Partenope”, a cinematic novel dedicated to his native Naples, not only did not receive awards, but was almost spat out: the film’s summary rating in the aforementioned critics’ rating was a terrible 1.6 points. .
