As we zigzag to-and-from prestigious festivals towards end-of-year-awards and, ultimately, the Oscars, The Contending will be landing in the Big Apple for the 62nd New York Film Festival which runs September 27th through October 14th at Lincoln Center as well as four partner venues: Alamo Drafthouse Cinema (Staten Island), Brooklyn Academy of Music (Brooklyn), The Bronx Museum (Bronx), and the Museum of the Moving Image (Queens). Tickets are currently on sale here.
The Fest opens with RaMell Ross’s Nickel Boys, closes with Steve McQueen’s 8th NYFF selection Blitz. The Centerpiece will be Pedro Almodóvar’s 15th NYFF selection and this year’s much deserved Golden Lion winner at Venice The Room Next Door.
“I am delighted that The Room Next Door will be the Centerpiece of the New York Film Festival,” offered director Pedro Almodóvar. “This festival has been my bridge to New York audiences for decades, so it only felt natural that the two protagonists go see a film at the Alice Tully Hall in one of the scenes of the movie.”
This year’s Main Slate boasts cinematic achievements from 24 different countries with 18 filmmakers making their NYFF Main Slate debut including Cannes prize winners: Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine as Light (Grand Prize), Sean Baker’s Anora (Palme d’Or), Roberto Minervini’s The Damned (Best Director, Un Certain Regard), Portugal’s International Oscar submission, Miguel Gomes’s Grand Tour (Best Director), Rungano Nyoni’s On Becoming a Guinea Fowl (Best Director, Un Certain Regard), and Mohammad Rasoulof’s The Seed of the Sacred Fig (Special Prize), which is Germany’s International Feature Oscar submission.
A number of selections have already been lauded at other Fests, they include Brady Corbet’s sprawling epic, The Brutalist, Dea Kulumbegashvili’s April, and Mike Leigh’s Hard Truths.
Some of the most anticipated Main Slate movies include David Cronenberg’s The Shrouds, Alain Guiraudie’s Misericordia, and Paul Schrader’s Oh, Canada.
The Spotlight section is chock full of exciting offerings including Luca Guadagnino’s already buzzed-about Queer, France’s International Feature Oscar submission, Jacques Audiard’s Emilia Pérez, Walter Salles’ I’m Still Here, Jesse Eisenberg’s A Real Pain, and Pablo Larraín’s Maria, showcasing luminous work by Angelina Jolie.
In addition, the Currents section presents films that reflect socio-political concerns and the Revivals section features 4K restorations of important works like Robert Bresson’s Four Nights of a Dreamer (1971), Clive Barker’s Hellraiser (1987) and Marguerite Duras’ La Musica (1966).
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One of the most outstanding Main Slate films, justly being celebrated as one of 2024’s best, is Sean Baker’s Anora. The film begins inside a strip club, lit up like the Amsterdam red-light district, where a host of female sex workers are performing lap dances for horny men. The scene felt so gratuitous to me. I imagined we had somehow cine-time traveled back to the 1980s where women were, once again, treated only as sex objects.
The scene reminded me of why I have never been in love with Baker’s work from Red Rocket to The Florida Project to Starlet, critics love to call his work gritty, rough, and authentic. I never quite got it.
But I have to happily admit that within minutes of watching Anora, the titular character known as Ani, had me bewitched, beguiled, and bayonetted, and that was all due to the endearing, magnetic, and kinetic Mikey Madison. Who was this dynamic actor? Okay, she scared me as Susan Atkins in Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, but her performance in Anora is one of those cinematic examples of watching the birth of a star.
And I have to give Baker props for creating a lunatic dark satire with the zaniest of plots that blends hilarious and insightful comedy with deeply felt pathos, rather seamlessly. There’s only one scene —a penultimate moment —that goes on a bit long and is too improvised, otherwise the film felt perfect and deliciously audacious. And, as to the opening, I began to view it differently, more as a tribute to the female form and the power women have over men. Baker’s narrative allows one to constantly reexamine one’s initial ideas.
The plot has Ani (real name Anora), who excels at her job, entertaining a cute, fun, charming 21-year-old on a typical night at work. She becomes so smitten that she gives him her cell number. He calls. They have a tryst in his mansion. They frolic in Coney Island with some of his friends. They fall in love (?) The only problem is he’s Ivan “Vanya” Zakharov (Mark Eydelshteyn), the son of a wealthy Russian mobster. So, when Ani and “Vanya” fly to Vegas and decide to get married, well, to say, trouble ensues is putting it mildly.
Soon thereafter a band of Russian fixers –and not very good ones– ascend onto the estate, sent by Toros (Karren Karagulian) an Armenian priest by day and enforcer by—whenever he’s needed. Garnick (Vache Tovmasyan) and Igor (Yura Borisov) show up to make certain the marriage gets annulled pronto. Garnick is Toros’s bumbling brother. Ani does her best to fight them off. Meanwhile Vanya runs away.
Ani is so taken with Vanya who appears to be as taken with her, when he’s not glued to playing video games. Is it naïveté, a fervent desire to escape her current life, delusion or just plain wishful thinking? The nuanced way in which Madison approaches Ani tells us it could be all four. And kudos to Baker because we are also drawn to Vanya, but we also have a creeping suspicion about how things will end, especially once Vanya’s icy mother (Darya Ekamasova, delectably mean) enters the narrative. FYI: I would totally watch a film that focused solely on her character.
Shout out to Drew Daniels’s gyrating cinematography.
As much as Madison is deservedly being touted for awards, one shouldn’t overlook just how good young Eydelshteyn is as Vanya, who could have easily come off simply as a spoiled and entitled brat. Instead, Eydelshteyn imbues him with lots of humanity. Borisov must also be cited as an initial stooge who turns out to be the only human who has any compassion for our protagonist.
Anora is a harsh comment on class as well as society’s immediately negative attitude towards sex workers. The film is also a hilarious, ill-fated rom-com. And while I appreciated Baker’s honest approach to the way the narrative unfolds, I was so rooting for a different kind of ending. And perhaps that’s exactly the point because so was Anora.
