So, as Conan O’Brien pointed out, the Oscars went to a film about someone standing up to a Russian, and maybe recent events mean we have to probe its political metaphor even further. Sean Baker’s cacophonous, crazy non-love story Anora won five Academy Awards including best actress for that rather amazing and newly born star Mikey Madison, playing the tough, smart, beautiful New York lap dancer who gets a Vegas quickie marriage to the spoilt and pusillanimous son of a Russian oligarch and then has to stand up to his parents. Madison embodies Anora’s complex courage: not exactly romantic, not exactly in love, but certainly believing in the wedding contract, in her own status as a legally married woman and in the possibility of happiness which is no more remote for her than for anyone else. She is the thoroughly modern, thoroughly 21st-century version of Marilyn Monroe in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, who thinks that a man being rich is like a girl being pretty. She is in an all-against-one contest against toxic masculinity, and her final scene is rather extraordinary: reclaiming the dignity and honesty of what she is doing for a living, against the bullying and bad faith of all the men in her life.
And yes, it is about an American who is wooed by a Russian, in whom she pathetically reposes her trust but who ultimately betrays her. Teasing out who is Trump and who is Putin in this scenario isn’t easy. Maybe Anora is the American Maga voter and her pampered and impetuous bridegroom is the Russified and compromised US president, a Trumputin who makes promises but is then himself brutally brought to heel by his owner. It’s an amazing win for this exhilarating and scintillating film, and what a career arc for the American indie auteur Baker.
