One of lime and another of sand on the ninth day of this intense Cannes Festival where, after a few days of bad weather, a blazing sun not suitable for long lines sets in. Two of the most anticipated films of the contest, Anora, by Sean Baker, and Parthenope, by Paolo Sorrentino, have had a very different reception.
The American indie film director has captivated with his version of a modern Cinderella in the figure of a young stripper from Brooklyn who falls in love with the spoiled son of a Russian oligarch and whose wedding will unleash the fury of his parents. Drama, chaos and a lot of comedy seasoned with endless swear words in a narrative that flows dizzyingly with the leadership of the incredible performance of Mikey Madison, pure energy in a complex and daring role that he knows how to handle to give the right amount of ambition and dignity of his character. It is aiming for an award and the film has become a strong candidate for the Palme d’Or.
Baker’s filmography is made up of people living on the margins, usually sex workers, trying to escape their precarious situation. If in Tangerine she explored the vicissitudes of a trans prostitute and in Red Rocket, presented in competition at Cannes in 2021, she talked about a porn actor in decline, with Anora she reflects the interior of those striptease clubs where Anie makes a living and meets the who will believe that he is her prince charming, Ivan, a capricious twenty-something fan of video games who has fun between parties, alcohol and sex thanks to the family’s money.
He falls in love with Anie and hires her to be his girlfriend for a week of debauchery, but the days of the fairy tale are numbered. The film is a kind of anti-Pretty Woman – a film that the director acknowledges had some influence on him – with wild moments that are reminiscent of the cinema of the seventies and that of Tarantino in which Baker has had a lot of fun. “Humor is necessary in human stories, it is part of our lives. I really can’t stand a story that doesn’t have a sense of humor because it’s not real,” he says about a story in which “I wanted to eliminate the stigma that surrounds that world of sex” to which he returns because “there are a million stories about sex workers who need to be counted. Human and universal stories that anyone can identify with on an emotional level.”
And he continues: “I think it is important to reflect what sex is today in this capitalist society. It is a career, it is a job and it has to be respected, in my opinion it must be decriminalized and regulated.” Baker wrote the script with Madison in mind for the lead role. “It was very surprising that Sean wanted to film with me, it is the first time they wrote a script for me,” mentioned the 25-year-old actress, known for her participation in the series ‘Better Things’ and Scream.
The young woman was in contact with the director, talking about the character, during the year that the writing process lasted. “I was able to create a character completely from scratch, from a physical point of view, from an attitude point of view.” And she had no problems filming the numerous sex scenes in which she appears naked – Baker calls them fully choreographed sex shots. “It was a lot of fun to film them and I was comfortable at all times,” she says. Her co-star, Russian actor Mark Eydelshteyn, is another great discovery in the film. “I’m not the son of oligarchs and unfortunately I don’t have a private plane,” he says with amusement, adding that “Sean knew how to see the dark side of myself and opened it up, it’s an interesting energy, you have money, you can do whatever you want… .thank you Sean.”
For his part, Paolo Sorrentino’s seventh foray into Cannes is a new obsession with beauty that pays tribute to Naples, his hometown. But the two and a quarter hours of Parthenope are too exhausting and enigmatic a journey whose result is not up to par with his previous work, It Was the Hand of God, much less The Great Beauty. “For me this film is the celebration of the journey of my life. A love letter to a free, spontaneous city that does not judge.”
The face of the unknown actress Celeste dalla Porta serves as a guide to tell the story of a very beautiful young woman, called Parthenope, from her birth on the beach of her house in 1950 until she retires after seventy. She is born into a wealthy family and her beauty overwhelms everyone, including her brother. She likes to read John Cheever—a role she takes on in a small Gary Oldman intervention—and she studies anthropology, although she doesn’t quite know what that means. She exudes freedom and a desire for knowledge and her existence is a coming and going through Capri and Naples, in a constant sensation of dolce vita and an abundance of sensuality.
Sorrentino captures nostalgic and overwhelmingly beautiful, also disconcerting, images like no one else, but there is no depth in what he narrates. Critics have mostly received it coldly. The best, the character of a university professor played by Silvio Orlando, in charge of a mysterious son.
For Sorrentino, who won the Jury Prize here in 2008 for ‘Il divo’, the trauma that the protagonist carries “is life itself.” One of the most powerful phrases that Oldman’s character says is that “beauty is like war, it opens doors.” In this regard, the British actor maintains that “when you are young you always want to grow, we always have one foot in the past and one in the future, we are not in the present” and that is precisely the idea that his character in the film underlines, a “melancholic, sad and drunk” writer, something that was not difficult for him to do because he found himself in that situation. “But I’ve been sober for 27 years,” he confesses.
