Anora and Russian dumplings

Sean Baker movies, ranked, and gourmet pelmeni.

Photo taken by and pie shared w/Khuyen Do of The Cakewalk.

Last night I had a perfect slice of pie. Concord grape mousse. Originally on the menu was orange creamsicle pie, which turned out to be strawberry, and then grape. The harried server supplying the update looked afraid that we’d balk at parade of substitutions—but no other fruit is so befitting of the balmy false fall of nyc. The thick mauve slab was layered with an equally thick whip, and somewhere in between and on top were crushed pretzels. It did not taste like fried chicken.

But the Caprese martini did taste just like basil and tomato, like a beautiful Neapolitan goddess’s bathwater. It was magically delicious—and so are the films outlined in today’s newsletter, flecked unexpectedly with surrealism and fantasy.

In other news,

Katie Stone

interviewed me for her into the fridge series. I learned a few things about myself grocery and wellness habits, namely that I stock my kitchen like an Italian grandma. Read, like, and subscribe here.

I don’t know if I’ll have another post by next week, so just know that The Substance starts streaming exclusively on MUBI on Halloween, so sign up here to get 30 days free.

• Taking place at a fictional midtown restaurant called The Grill (no relation to the one at the Four Seasons), LA COCINA is an anti-The Bear, spotlighting BOH immigrant workers who cook your food. It’s theatrical and expressionistic and stressful and silly. Rooney Mara adds some star presence, but mostly steps out of the way for other actors and characters to emerge. I talked to director Alonso Ruizpalacios for Eater who said hauntingly that for these characters, food istransactional.

• MURDERING THE DEVIL (1970)— an anarchic feminist parable about a single woman courting a man who may or may not be the devil against—provides a premise to skewer the false promises of marriage. Against her best judgment, she keeps feeding the insatiable man an unseemly amount of food (cakes upon cakes, goose livers, whole loaves of bread) and nonfoods (he eats the plates) getting nothing in return and no promises of marriage. Sound familiar?

  • This wry little-seen and originally banned gem of the Czech New Wave comes from the merrily cracked brain of costume and production designer and screenwriter Esther Krumbachová, whose visual prowess may have ensorcelled you in films like DAISIES (Věra Chytilová) and continues to do so here.

  • Also related: the artsy vampire movie VALERIE AND HER WEEK OF WONDERS

• Photographer Robert Frank and novelist Randy Wurlitzer’s film CANDY MOUNTAIN came out in 1986 but has a distinctively 1960s mindset. A loose road movie that champions art »» business and creativity »» capitalism offers glimpses of musicians like Tom Waits, Joe Strummer, and Dr. John, and French New Wave icon Bulle Ogier.

• Mati Diop’s documentary DAHOMEY charting about the return of royal artifacts being returned to Benin from France is slim but not slight. It turns out 67 minutes is the perfect amount of time to pique people’s interests regarding decolonization, cultural appropriation, and reclaiming histoircal identity.

• The spellbinding new moth documentary NOCTURNES is my new favorite way to fall asleep. Less talk, more observations and fluttering wings.

• This weekend I’m planning to see CONCLAVE. My husband won’t stop tee-heeing every time Stanley Tucci hams it up on screen. Will confirm once I’ve watched, but I presume this to be exactly the kind of thing TBS would’ve programmed on repeat back in the early 2000s. I mean that only as the sincerest compliment.

---

ANORA

Dir. by Sean Baker

Spoilers in the very last paragraph. Sean Baker’s movies are all about money and his latest, Anora emerges as a neo-screwball comedy fueled by a breathless energy and bravado performances. If you’ve seen Better Things I don’t need to tell you that Mikey Madison is a star in the making. The former fictional eldest daughter in Pamela Adlon’s show, something like motherhood’s response to Louis, has a wildly unique squeaky-brat voice (no relation to Charlie XCX). It resounds loudly and memorably in the final scenes of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (she’s the Mansonite afire) and again in Anora where it’s padded with an outer-borough accent, thick and effortlessly flowing. 

The film opens with a scene of her and others grinding voluptuously on a male client at Headquarters, the midtown strip club where they work. The music is loud, the arena flashy. The razzle dazzle is quickly done away once her shift ends and Ani reaches the gray horizons of Brighton Beach and the apartment she shares with her sister equipped with a cruelly primo view of the B train. It has the same soul-crushing rattle of the nearby Coney Island roller coaster that shook Alvy Singer to neurosis.

But Ani is another of filmmaker Sean Baker’s hardscrabble lower-middle class strivers and made of stronger stuff than a Woody Allen character. Baker’s made a career out of portraying the marginalized through a raw-but-sensitive lens, and that’s no different here, relaying the physically and emotionally demands of sex work (not to mention how it can also very boring, just like any other work. These depictions are confident and Baker does his research with experienced collaborators though I’m curious to get other sex workers’ takes). Skirting exploitation, Anora gone bigger and bolder, meshing genres and moods—the rom-com + gritty nyc-set 1970s pictures—so seamlessly that jaded ones like me forget that few precedents exist.

Not the real title card.

Ani’s life is changed when she meets Ivan Zhakarov (Mark Eydelshteyn) the barely 20-year-old son of a Russian oligarch with money to burn, which he certainly does, showering her with Benjamins and eventually a four-karat ring, all this the culmination of Ani’s extracurricular activities outside the club pretending to be his “very horny girlfriend,” partying on New Years at his parent’s gaudy new-money mansion, and taking a ketamine-fueled interlude in Vegas. (Technically in Mill Basin, the house they filmed used to be a real Russian nepo baby’s fortress.)

Cartoonishly immature but not uncharmingly so with his floppy hair, Ivan/Vanya lives a life bouncing off the money-padded walls, propelled by an energetic insouciance that only accompanies extraordinary wealth. He literally ends a session of jackhammering sex with somersaults. Meanwhile Ani who is notably neither gold digger nor delusionally romantic naif, projects a vulnerability and vigor that makes her the kind of relatively balanced character we can root for her. Madison captures the nuances of a sex worker putting on exuberant performance for a client, but also a young woman sometimes having actual fun and courting very cautiously idea of what exactly this transaction means. This is why we feel for her so deeply when her husband-child’s total cowardice and lack of balls comes to the fore 45-minutes into the film.

Ivan’s shit-eating grin fades almost immediately into mopey silence and obstinate fear, abandoning Ani as quickly as that dad in Force Majeure (Ruben Ostlund), only it’s not the avalanche that triggers everything, it’s the fear of responsibilities. When Ivan’s parents in Russia learn of their marriage in the tabloids, they send their bumbling henchmen to forcibly annul it. Pay attention to the state-side Armenian consigliere Toros, played by Karren Karagulian who savors every second of screen time. Baker revels in the profane chaos of verbal sparring, and Karagulian (a Baker regular, best known as the cab driver with a fondness for carwash blowjobs in Tangerine) gives us a masterclass in timing, with a solemn face frozen somewhere between the incredulous and patronizing. He is just so funny to me.

The film shifts gears into a beat-the-clock chase-mode (hence apt comparisons to the Safdies), throttling us around South Brooklyn. Filmed on location, we’re treat to sights like Paul’s Daughter, Tatiana, Parkview Diner, the Belt Parkway. All of that kicks off with a home-invasion at Ivan’s house. The unsparing physicality of the scene—heightened by Ani’s relentless screaming as she’s tied and gagged—begins to leech its humor, as what was once amusingly and robustly argumentative curdles into a potential threat. I felt uncomfortable, like Baker had gone astray. But the accelerating hijinx, which overpowers the emotional weight of the scene, reminds that real violence is never far for people like Ani.  

Somewhat less effectively, the sustained kidnapping-exercise turns out to be a necessary preparation for the film’s finale which matches Ani with a new partner. Thee camera keeps landing on muscled Ivan and his big blue eyes and setting up the pieces for emotional payoff. How you feel about the ending is probably indicative of your attitude towards romance. It felt revelatory and subversive in the moment at the scene-level, but too tidy at the overall narrative-one. The intimate moment is shot earnestly and without manipulation, the story, as with many modern fairytales, reveals you may find Prince Charming in your own poor backyard.

Related viewing: The Philadelphia Story, more real screwball comedies, The French Connection for outerborough chase scenes, and most importantly, other Sean Baker movies. My rankings for those below. 

Related reading: Adrien Curry talks to Sean Baker about his signature font.

---

A spin on Eastern European classics: DACHA 46

Just as Baker tries to spin up and meld genres, mostly to familiar effect, so too do Jessica and Trina Quinn. The couple behind Dacha 46, the roving pop-up and catering service play around with Eastern European classics adding their own creative, and sometimes queer, twists.

Traditional Siberian pelmeni, those plump dumplings filled with pork and veal and onions, might be dyed a rainbow of colors and the dough fortified with spinach or carrot. Or they might be vegetarian, stuffed with potatoes and sauerkraut; cheddar and onions approximating a baked potato; or a blend of fresh creamy cheeses, in a nodto the Georgian dish khachapuri. Oreshki, their take on the walnut-shaped Russian supermarket cookie, might be spread with maple cream or flavored with earl grey and poppy seeds.

I remember walking to the Quinn’s Bed-Stuy apartment to pick up buckwheat (gluten-free) pelmeni and medovik during their pandemic when they began, but now you can preorder frozen bags each month for local delivery. They are double the price of what you’d pay at Netcost, but very much worth it, as all homemade things are. Plus, the two chefs have impressive resumes—between the two of them they’ve worked at Red Hook Tavern, Rezdora, and Agi’s Counter before starting Dacha on their own.

This weekend I’m getting their seasonal pampushki, their version of the Ukranian garlic roll that’ll be filled with gouda and pumpkin in addition to the dumplings. Someone remind me to pickup sour cream.

---

Sean Baker movies, ranked