HUMANITY ON THE MARGINS

NAMRATA JOSHI HIS year's Palme d'Or winner, Sean Baker's Anora, made me take a T 180-degree turn in my response to it, through the 139 minutes of the run time.

-  NAMRATA JOSHI

Initially, the endless scenes of young New York sex worker Anora aka Ani (Mikey Madison), serving the clients, gets extremely exhausting and distressing to process, with Baker going wildly brazen with his camera's unswerving carnal attention, leaving absolutely nothing to the viewers' imagination.

Is he pandering to the intrinsic voyeur in the prurient viewer? Or is he exposing and taking down the sheer grotesquery and exploitation that the sex workers must go through every day in the line of duty? Even as you stay conflicted equal measure drawn into the world of stripping clubs and disturbed by their reality the narrative flows on and lodges you right in the middle of a wacky romance between Ani and Vanya (Mark Eydelshteyn) the kooky son of a Russian oligarch that leads on to elopement and a fairy tale wedding.