The Oscar race is, it seems, coming down to a contest between what is unquestionably the worst movie of 2024—Emilia Perez—and what might be the best movie of 2024. That would be Anora, an uncategorizable and unclassifiable story of a lost soul, a 23-year-old stripper in Brooklyn who also trades sexual favors for money. She hits the financial and emotional jackpot when the son of a Russian oligarch falls for her.
So it’s a love story, albeit an entirely transactional one—beautifully and precisely observed and unsentimental by its writer-director, Sean Baker. He neither condescends to his intellectually compromised characters nor excuses them their profound personal and moral failings. But those failings come into play when, all of a sudden, the fairy-tale romance goes off the rails. At this point we’re about 20 minutes in, and bam—Anora takes off like a rocket. With no warning that it’s coming, Baker delivers a second act that proves to be the best screwball comedy made in America since Arthur more than 40 years ago.
Anora becomes screamingly, laugh-out-loud funny in ways that are entirely unexpected, and builds and builds in ways you cannot possibly anticipate and I will not try to describe. Nor should you ask anyone or look for information on it; it’s really best if you go see this thing without knowing much, though I feel obliged to warn you that Anora is another one of the many 2024 movies that features a significant amount of nudity and pretty explicit sex. (I was going to say keep it away from your kids, but I was a kid in the 1970s and practically every movie of significance costarred breasts and foul language, and I guess I made it through all right.)
All the while, though, it maintains its laser focus on Ani (née Anora), played by a 25-year-old television actress named Mikey Madison in what may be not only the performance of the year but of the decade. She is a conniving, materialistic, id-driven girl-child without prospects or much of a future ahead of her; there’s little reason for us to care about what happens to her. But that is the brilliance of Baker’s script and direction, which never lose sight of the humanity of the lunatic cast of characters we are following throughout—not only Ani and her boyfriend, but also a Russian Orthodox priest who does double duty as a family fixer, some henchmen who don’t really know how to hench well, and a poor guy who works in a third-rate candy store on the boardwalk and runs afoul of all of them.
Ani deserves our attention and care because she is a human being struggling to get by as best she can. She seems to find deliverance in fairy-tale style—only to find herself in a desperate hot pursuit of that deliverance when things go sideways. Her reactions to her struggle are extreme, sad, crazy, heartbreaking, and hilarious to watch. And the movie settles into a conclusion that, befitting its setting among Russians, is almost Chekhovian in its delicacy and ambiguity.
The idea that this extraordinary piece of work is in a contest with Emilia Perez tells you something about the decline of everything. Because Emilia Perez is dreadful—both conceptually and in execution. See, according to writer-director Jacques Audiard, the problem with the psychotic mass-murdering Mexican drug lords who are destroying Western civilization is that they have been brainwashed by toxic masculinity. And what is the perfect cure? Transsexuality. The title character is El Chapo with his male machinery removed—and once El Chapo becomes a she, they become social justice warriors for the poor and oppressed.
No, I am not kidding. No, this is not a comedy. But it is a musical (again, no I’m not kidding), mostly in Spanish but a little in English, featuring an immortal exchange in recitative between El Chapo’s lawyer and a doctor in a clinic in Thailand:
Lawyer: Hello, very nice to meet you, I’d like to know about a sex change operation.
Doctor: Man to woman or woman to man?
Lawyer: Man to woman.
Doctor: Penis to vagina!
You would know this yourself. You could. You almost certainly have a Netflix subscription and Emilia Perez has been available on Netflix for months. You might even have watched some of it. Many people have. The thing is, I haven’t met a single person who has made it past the 60-minute mark of this two-hour movie because (with the exception of Zoe Saldana, the blockbuster franchise actress who does a wonderful job playing the lawyer) its awfulness doesn’t even rise to the level of “this is a camp classic, I just gotta see how bad this is going to get the longer it goes on.” Rather, everybody shuts Emilia Perez off and then goes and takes a shower. Or puts on a real estate flipping show.
Why did it get 13 Oscar nominations? Guess why. You know why. It’s the same reason the movie nobody has seen about Donald Trump got Oscar nominations for the guy playing Trump and the guy playing Roy Cohn. Hollywood is trying to tell us things again. Emilia Perez got the same number of nominations as All About Eve because it’s about the wonders of sex change operations and how they will solve all the problems of our planet. The person playing Emilia Chapo, Karla Sofia Gascón, is nominated for Best Actress. If she wins, in part by defeating Mikey Madison, it will be a scandal—but hey, if actresses in Hollywood don’t have the courage to complain about their awards being taken away by biological males, then those awards should be taken away by biological males. It’ll serve them right.
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This article was originally published at freebeacon.com
