Sean Baker’s time is here.  After nailing down his gig-labor docufiction style in the 2004 food-delivery tragedy Take Out and then applying it to a long string of sex-industry dramas in the couple decades since, Baker has finally earned his moment in the prestige-circuit spotlight.  Earlier breakthroughs like Tangerine & The Florida Project perfectly calibrated his caustically funny, soberingly traumatic storytelling style in his best work to date, but he emerged from those triumphs recognized as a name to watch rather than one of the modern greats.  He’s been recalibrating in the years since, going full heel in his deliberately unlovable black comedy Red Rocket before face-turning to the opposite extreme in his latest work, Anora.  Clearly, Baker has decided he wants audiences to love him again, and it’s impressive to see him swing so wildly in tone between his last two features without losing his voice.  Anora is the feel-good sweet counterbalance to the feel-bad sour Sean Baker of Red Rocket.  Both are equally funny & frantic, but only one is affable enough to set the filmmaker up for a Best-Picture Oscar run after taking home the top prize at Cannes.  It’s his time.

The surprising thing about Anora’s critical success is that it’s such a dutiful continuation of the work Baker’s already been doing for years – just with an extra dash of sugar to help sweeten the bitter.  Mikey Madison stars as the titular erotic dancer, another trapped-by-capitalism sex worker in a long tradition of Sean Baker anti-heroines dating at least as far back as 2012’s Starlet.  Anora is a thorny, chaotic, unfiltered baddie whom the audience instantly loves for her faults, because she’s fun to be around.  Like in Tangerine & The Florida Project, we meet her working customers in a high-stress but manageable profession, then follow her on an anarchic journey through her larger urban community, walking a tightrope between slapstick physical comedy & face-slap physical violence until she’s offered a moment of grace in the final beat.  As the editor, Baker has worked out a well-timed rhythm for this story template through its many repetitions in previous works.  He sweeps the audience up in the hedonistic romance of Anora’s Vegas-strip marriage to a big-spender Russian brat who offers a Cinderellic escape from the strip club circuit in exchange for helping secure a green card.  The quick-edit montage of that fantasy then slows down to linger on its real-world fallout, investing increasingly long, painful stretches of time on Russian gangsters’ retribution for the young couple generating tabloid headlines that embarrass the brat’s oligarch father.  The laughs continue to roll in, but the punchlines (and physical punches) get more brutal with each impact until it just isn’t fun anymore, as is the Sean Baker way.

There’s nothing especially revelatory about the Sean Baker formula in Anora.  In the context of his filmography, it’s just more of the same (of a very good thing).  However, the increased attention to his career-long project as an auteur has had its immediate benefits, not least of all in Baker’s collaboration with the local repertory series Gap Tooth Cinema (formerly known as Wildwood).  When asked to program a screening for Gap Tooth as a primer for what he was aiming to achieve in Anora, Baker offered three titles as options: Fellini’s Oscar-winning sex worker drama Nights of Cabiria, the fish-out-of-water Eddie Murphy comedy Coming to America, and a second Italian sex-work story in 1960’s Adua and Her Friends.  Gap Tooth ultimately selected Adua, the most obscure title of the trio and, more importantly, one of the very best titles they’ve screened to date.  I don’t know that Sean Baker’s name would have come to mind had I discovered Adua and Her Friends in a different context, since it’s a much more formally polished picture than the anarchic comedies he’s become known for since he filmed Tangerine on an iPhone.  The comparisons that more readily came to mind were Mildred Pierce, Volver, and The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas.  It’s a less recognizable title than any of those comparisons, but that’s the only way in which it’s lesser.  It’s an incredibly stylish, sexy, tragic, and cool story of self-reinvented sex workers making do in late-50s Italy, one that speaks well to Baker’s genuine interest in his characters’ inner lives beyond what they symbolize as society’s economic casualties.

Adua and Her Friends is a darkly comic drama about a small crew of sex workers who are forcibly retired by the Merlin Law of 1958, which ceased the legal operation of all Italian brothels.  Unsure how to get by without the only trade they have experience in, the women conspire to open a rural, roadside restaurant as a front for a new, illegal brothel they will run themselves.  Only, after a few successful months of food service—depicted as being equally difficult as prostitution—they decide they’d rather “go straight” in their new business than convert it into an underground brothel.  As you’d expect, the self-reinvented women’s lives as restaurateurs are upended by men from their past that refuse to let them start fresh, the same way Anora is blocked from upgrading her social position from escort to wife.  Where Adua excels is in taking the time to flesh out the inner lives & conflicts of each woman in its main cast.  Lolita is led astray by conmen who take advantage of her youthful naivete; Marilina struggles to reestablish a familial relationship with her estranged son; Milly hopes to leave her past behind and start over as a devoted housewife, Anora-style.  Adua (Oscar-winner Simone Signoret) gets the first & final word in her struggle to establish a new career before she ages out of her livelihood, but the movie is an ensemble-cast melodrama at heart, asking you to love, laugh with, and weep for every woman at the roadside restaurant (and to hiss at the cads who selfishly ruin it all).

Much like in Baker’s films, the majority of Adua and Her Friends is a surprisingly good time, with plenty slapstick gags & irreverently bawdy jokes undercutting the hooker-with-a-heart-of-gold tropes typical to this subject.  Like Anora, it’s a 2+ hour comedy with an emotionally devastating ending, one that carefully avoids making its titular sex worker a purely pitiable symbol of societal cruelty even while acknowledging that she’s backed into a pretty shitty corner.  Adua and Anora can be plenty cruel themselves when it helps their day-to-day survival.  That might be where the two films’ overlapping interests end, since Adua lounges in a much more relaxed hangout vibe than Anora, scored by repetitions of Santo & Johnny’s “Sleepwalk” rather than t.A.T.u.’s “All the Things She Said.”  Adua and her friends loiter around their Italian villa, fanning themselves in a deep-focus tableau, while Anora is dragged around Vegas & NYC by Russian mobsters who (for the most part) don’t see her as a human being.  There is one early sequence in Adua where a black-out drunken night is represented in choppy lost-time edits that may have been an influence on the rhythms of Anora’s first act, but otherwise I assume Baker was inspired less by the film’s formal style than he was by the characterizations of its main cast.  The frank, sincere, humanizing approach to sex-worker portraiture in Adua and Her Friends speaks well to Sean Baker’s continued interest in sex-work as a cinematic subject and, although both were great, I feel like I learned more about his work through its presentation than I did by watching his latest film.

 -Brandon Ledet