Things are going a little too well in Anora until a call from Russia and a knock at the door changes the trajectory of the movie. This extended sequence, deeply stressful and riotously funny at the same time, is reason enough to see Sean Baker’s Palme d’Or winner. But somehow the journey that follows only gets better and more interesting.
Anora is a fairy tale that spoils. An exotic dancer from Brighton Beach, Anora (Mikey Madison), or Ani, as she likes to be called, gets paired one evening with a young man, Ivan (Mark Eydelshteyn), who requests a Russian speaker. She can speak a little and understand everything and they quickly hit it off, embarking on a whirlwind ride together. First, Ivan hires her by the hour, then for the week for which she commands a cool US$15,000 (accounting for inflation that’s about double what Vivian got in Pretty Woman. Edward may have been a successful corporate raider, but he didn’t have oligarch money.) Ivan even tells Ani he would have paid US$30,000.
For as crass and ugly and reckless as it all is, it’s also something of a joy bomb to watch Ani and Ivan indulge in the youthful hedonism of unlimited funds — there’s drugs, champagne, private jets, luxury suites and, perhaps most importantly, they’re having fun. When he proposes and they marry on an impromptu trip to Las Vegas, you almost believe it could work. Then the foundation collapses: Ivan’s parents find out and the guys who were supposed to be keeping track of the wayward kid, presumably in the US to study, are sent off to fix it, and fast. They have less than 24 hours before Ivan’s parents land in New York and Ivan has gone missing. Suddenly, Anora with its ticking clock, missing kid, anxious goons and determined dancer, turns into a white-knuckle ride that gives Uncut Gems a run for its money.
Photo: AP
Prior to Anora, I’m not sure that I was especially concerned with the odyssey of a streetwise exotic dancer who, for a fleeting moment, has everything money can buy. Now I can’t imagine not having taken the trip, and meeting the colorful ensemble: Anora, Ivan (who is being called the Russian Timothee Chalamet), Igor (Yura Borisov) the thuggish-seeming muscle with a soft voice, kind eyes and a heart of gold, Toros (Karren Karagulian), the very stressed Armenian who was supposed to keep Ivan in line, and Garnick (Vache Tovmasyan), Toros’ in-over-his-head brother hoping to make a good impression on Ivan’s family.
They aren’t just bad-guy types, either: They are all fascinating and empathetic in their own right, just trying to do a job for their powerful employers. By the end of one very long night with this motley crew, you might wonder if you’re even rooting for Ani to get what she says she wants anymore.
As a filmmaker, Baker has a particular knack for transporting moviegoers to places they’d not ordinarily go, with characters they’d similarly likely never encounter. Whether it’s a few transgender sex workers walking down a less-than-picturesque stretch of Santa Monica Boulevard one Christmas Eve, a single mom and her six-year-old living in a downtrodden motel right outside the “happiest place on earth,” or a washed-up porn star/conman who goes home to Texas, he finds wonder, beauty, dark humor and truth in the ugly, the unseen and the unheard. The milieus are gritty, not something anyone would be bragging about on Instagram, and yet feel endlessly more authentic than some other filmmakers indulging in poverty porn.
Photo: AP
The biggest handicap of Anora is perhaps the hurdle of preconceptions. It seems almost too ‘90s for a young actor’s big, serious, awards-buzzy breakthrough to come from getting naked and dancing on a pole. And yet in the hands of Baker and Madison, it works: Anora both embraces and transcends the cliches. It’s not trying to pretend that it’s not exploitative on some level; that might even be the point. And anyway, you might be surprised just how quickly you commit to this once-in-a-lifetime ride.
Photo: AP
Ajay Verma, a consultant gastroenterologist at Kettering general hospital in Northamptonshire, says our gut is a “complex machine.” “It is constantly providing us with the nutrition we need, initially to grow and develop, and then for us to survive, thrive and repair from injury and illness.” How can we keep it functioning well? Put simply: “Make sure what you put into it is balanced, and that you clear out its waste products adequately,” Verma says. “In a general gastroenterology clinic, the most common conditions we see are irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), gastroesophageal reflux disease, inflammatory bowel disease and constipation,” says Nisha
The arithmetic is straightforward and uncomfortable. By the end of 2025, Taiwan had committed itself to a 50-30-20 electricity mix — half natural gas, 30 per cent coal, 20 per cent renewables. The Ministry of Economic Affairs’s (MOEA) own monthly energy reports tell a different story. Natural gas reached 47.8 per cent of generation last year. Coal stood at 35.4 per cent, comfortably above its target ceiling. Renewables came in at 13.1 per cent, well short of the 20 per cent Taipei had pledged a decade earlier. Installed renewable capacity reached roughly half of the 12 gigawatts (GW) the government
Last week US President Donald Trump was asked by a reporter whether he would speak on the phone to the President of Taiwan. “l’ll speak to him. I speak to everybody. We have that situation very well in hand,” Trump said. This marked the second time in a couple of weeks he had said he would talk to the President of Taiwan. In 2016 he famously took a call from then-president Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文), when he was president-elect. Despite warnings that the apocalypse was nigh because of a phone call, the world quickly forgot about the conversation between two democratically-elected presidents.
May 25 to May 31 Few believed that apples could be cultivated on a commercial scale in Taiwan’s high mountains. When horticulturalist Cheng Chao-hsiung (程兆熊) first proposed the idea in 1955, both American and Taiwanese colleagues dismissed it as implausible, arguing that temperate fruit could not be reliably grown on a subtropical island, especially on rugged terrain. However, it was this terrain in the Central Mountain Range where many Chinese Civil War veterans were resettled in the late 1950s. With limited job prospects and no family in Taiwan, they were placed on cooperative farms aimed toward self-sufficiency. Some say the conditions
RSS