62nd New York Film Festival Coverage

Harlan Jacobson – Oct 14, 2024

The 62nd New York Film Festival concludes this long holiday weekend at Lincoln Center with North American premiere screenings of Steve McQueen’s Blitz, the fictional recounting of the bombing of London during WWII. The film, starring Saoirse Ronan as a young mother trying to survive the Nazi Blitzkrieg, simultaneously premiered at its home country London Film Festival, and underscores New York’s value as a showcase and launchpad that mirrors the shifting fortunes of films as they make their way around the festival world. Our film critic, Harlan Jacobson has more.

Sean Baker’s ANORA, springboards next week into theatres after playing here at the NYFF, its final gig on the festival circuit which started with winning the Palme D’Or in Cannes in May. The story, written and directed by Baker, starts when a Russian playboy of the western world wanders into a West Side Manhattan strip club and takes an Uzbeki American lap dancer and the audience for a wild ride. That it won the Palme D’Or 2024 is not entirely a surprise in that the jury was chaired by Greta Gerwig, who is in regular touch with the Goddess and therefore was clearly pre-positioned to take the measure of a film with a lap dancer as its central character.

Baker has made a career out of subtle portraits of sex workers, all of them – Starlet, Tangerine, The Florida Project and Red Rocket – well-scripted, small stories presenting the array of personalities working in the trade, and I would have called them quiet, except neither Tangerine, famously filmed on an iPhone following a Black trans hooker careening around LA, nor Red Rocket are quiet. At 53, Baker may be the best character filmmaker of his generation. What he did in Anora has roots in romantic comedy all the way back to Frank Capra’s It Happened One Night (1934) with Gable and Colbert falling in love over the class divide in the high Depression, and the breathtaking truth-telling of Jean Eustache’s The Mother and the Whore (1973), a generational touch stone of the Sexual Revolution in which Bernadette LaFont, Jean Pierre Leaud and Francoise Lebrun sketched out how a man might finally grasp female sexual appetite that no longer needed apology, cover or explanation. 

Having said that, I should note that there has been considerable pushback on Anora, since it won the Palme D’Or at Cannes, both by critics at Toronto and at the New York Film Festival, where I went to see it again. “Predictable, without meaning, empty, too long “—are all terms said to me in discussion with voices I like, not only about Anora but other new lengthy films this season. But my second screening at NY still held me rapt in its story about risking love in a transactional world, particularly where immigration and class sweep the grounds like spotlights in a prison yard.

Baker has pulled a cast from nowhere — Mikey Madison, who adroitly navigates Uzbeki Brighton Beach and strip club Manhattan as Ani, who blows bubble gum between squirms, Mark Edelshteyn, as Ivan, a 22 year-old Russian wildboy parked out in a multi-milliondollar pad in Brooklyn by his Moscow based oligarch family with unlimited funds.  We meet both Ivan and Ani in a strip club, where Ivan is the Russian Id unchained and unconcerned that Ani is fleecing the sheepish out of him for an upstairs lapdance. The third leg is Yura Borisov, a 32 year-old Russian actor (Compartment 6) who enters the film midway as Igor, a reluctant enforcer for Ivan’s gangster parents and ends it as something else. 

The last guy Ani serviced said that she looked like his daughter and bought five lap dances. It is a throwaway ewww line that just barely under the surface invokes Trump’s public lusting over his daughter, Ivanka, in her cherry days before she assumed her adult role in family grifting. But that’s all it is, a throwaway, as Baker’s Ani is a classic sexual adventurer, much further along than Emma Stone’s Bella Baxter reconstructing the rules of the game in Poor Things a year ago. Ani is ready for something more but doesn’t know it, and it’s the thrill of watching a tough cookie become disarmed that is the risk a great film takes.  

The overall arc of Baker’s Anora is a meet-cute in a sexual clip joint that ricochets back and forth in private jets between New York and the cuckoo crockpot that is Vegas and arrives bruised and beat up back in Brooklyn after a tour of Russian America. To watch Russian money at work in the furnace of working-class New York is black comedy. Ivan’s parents board their jet back in Moscow to say Nyet to their son’s crazy fling, after Toros, a Russian Orthodox priest (actor Karren Karagulian in a performance worthy of the late Alan Arkin), who doubles as their enforcer, steps out of his robes and leaves a baptism he’s conducting to pry Ivan from the hooker.  Rest assured, the right romance emerges at the end of it all, with a glimmer of something like love in the right place with the right homey, when it’s the right time at last. 

Films do not do that every day. Predictions are foolish, but we’ve seen far less out of Cannes climb the awards ladder in the US after a domestic launch at the New York Film Festival. Anora opens next weekend, and I’m anxious to hear what you think.

This weekend at the NYFF you can also catch THE BRUTALIST, by 36 year-old actor turned Director Brady Corbet (he was in 13 in 2003), with Adrien Brody as the young Hungarian Jewish architect, Laszlo Toth, whose Holocaust experience shaped a modern sensibility of design, Brutalism, classic lines abstracted into concrete, glass and soaring space. Brody is quite wonderful as Toth, taking the torch out of the hands of Ayn Rand’s Howard Roark character in The Fountainhead, to butt heads with American money over vision.  Raves in Venice, sold-out performances in Toronto, and for you to see at the NYFF this weekend, or when it opens Dec. 20. And finally, MARIA, Pablo Lorrain’s critically divisive telling of the life of opera legend Maria Callas, with Angelina Jolie making a bid to revive her reputation as a serious player and possibly an Oscar. Again, raves in Venice, a secret screening in Toronto, and a divided critical response in NY. More later when Netflix opens Maria in NY after Thanksgiving and online Dec. 11. 

All three films are about artists in America, a diva, a designer and a lap dancer. And I’m HJ at the NYFF.

Tune in here for Harlan’s Review.

The 62nd New York Film Festival is held at the Film at Lincoln Center (FLC) is a nonprofit organization that celebrates cinema as an essential art form and fosters a vibrant home for film culture to thrive. FLC presents premier film festivals, retrospectives, new releases, and restorations year-round in state-of-the-art theaters at New York’s Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts.

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