By Ari Lauer-Frey
For the last couple of decades, the superhero movie has been one of the most popular and profitable products of the U.S. film industry. And for good reason. The formula of the superhero movie is one part accessibility to one part pure entertainment — offering characters, themes and storylines that transcend cultural specificity (making them universally consumable), and combining them with the most financially robust production companies in the world. However, this genre has recently experienced an era of decline. Superhero movies — which operate upon arguably the most standard filmmaking techniques and effects — seem to be losing their cultural force. In an article for Fortune, Jake Coyle explains that the sameness of the genre seems to be the cause of its current financial and cultural lull: “If more-of-the-same no longer has quite the same appeal for moviegoers, an industry that for years has depended on sequels, prequels, reboots and remakes to make up the bulk of its profits may require new creativity.”
And, at the same time that audiences seem to be craving novelty, a starkly different approach to filmmaking (though of much smaller commercial heights) appears to be gaining traction in the U.S.: American Neorealism, an approach to filmmaking that highlights the everyday, the real and the stories within the seemingly mundane. It is from this landscape that a movie like “Anora” (2024) can emerge and succeed.
“Anora” is the latest addition to director & writer Sean Baker’s filmography full of deeply American, harshly realistic stories. The feelings these films conjure are as varied and intertwined as real life, constantly pulling audiences from humor to dullness, beauty to devastation and back and forth again. Reactions to his films reflect the challenge they provide. “I’ve never gone out of a movie where everyone was silent at the end — kind of in this brief moment of ‘what did we just witness? What did we just watch?’” Beau Fuller (‘27) said in reaction to “Anora.” The film has had a profound effect on audiences worldwide, winning the prestigious Palme d’Or at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival and becoming Baker’s highest-grossing film. “Anora” represents a possible moment of change — both in what stories are accepted in the world of popular film and in Baker’s personal trajectory as a storyteller.
The most widely accepted origin for neorealism in filmmaking is Italian neorealism. Following the devastation of WWII, the Italian film industry faced massive challenges. Cinecitta, Mussolini’s Italian Hollywood, had been stripped of its function as a propaganda machine — as well as much of its film equipment. These immense material challenges generated fresh creative opportunities. The newly freed Italian filmmakers wanted to make movies that communicated economic, social and moral instability, yet it lacked the means to do so. However, their limited resources came to serve the form. Film projects turned to the war-torn city streets for their sets, the local people for their casts and a documentarian approach as a primary storytelling technique. The result was a movement that defied both the structures of pre-WWII Italian film and the cultural pull of the Golden Age of Hollywood, creating politically, historically and socioeconomically hyperspecific stories.
These cinematic concerns with realistic narratives and ethnographic analysis have begun to emerge again — most recently in the context of contemporary American movie-making. In 2009, A.O. Scott offered an early observation of this trend in his article for The New York Times titled “Neo-Neo Realism,” noting the quantity and success of movies that focused on slice-of-life storytelling and ostensibly mundane characters. Like the neorealisms of post-war Italy, Scott suggested this “Neo-Neo Realism” to be the necessary product of a vulnerable time: “Perhaps it would be worth considering that what we need from movies, in the face of a dismaying and confusing real world, is realism.”
Sean Baker’s movies provide just that. Examples include his 2004 film, “Takeout,” which shows a day in the life of an undocumented immigrant making food deliveries to pay off his smuggling debt, or 2017’s “The Florida Project,” which features a 6-year-old protagonist accompanying her mother in selling knock-off perfumes outside of Disney World; and his latest project, “Anora,” captures a whirlwind moment in the life of Ani (Mikey Madison), a 23-year-old woman working as a stripper in New Jersey. Baker’s movies all have a common thread: they tell the story of American mythology through centering the stories of those least likely to have their stories on the big screen.
Baker’s last five films have featured sex workers with the intent of destigmatizing sex work. However righteous this may be, it is important to remain critical of why a white man from middle-class origins so exclusively tells these kinds of stories and to ask if he should. It is similarly important to ask how these stories are being created and how well. The line between spotlighting and fetishizing is thin, and by telling stories that are not necessarily his, Baker is rightfully vulnerable to critique. Baker writes and directs with intentionality steeped in the neorealist tradition, taking inspiration from his Italian predecessors by casting community actors, employing intensive research and emphasizing the importance of place through on-location shooting. Emi Howard (‘25) confirms the importance of such intent when featuring people from such communities, explaining that, “if they’re completely absent from it, then it risks just re-inscribing the same problems that [Baker]’s trying to combat.”
“Anora” continues this focus while simultaneously interrupting the mundanity of Baker’s previous work. Ani’s life begins monotonously but swells with frenzy when she meets Ivan (Mark Eydelshteyn), the son of a Russian oligarch, who fulfills his personal American fantasies when entering a quasi-romantic but transactional relationship with Ani, which soon leads to marriage. The movie develops into an “Uncut Gems”–paced conflict as Ivan’s family attempts to annul their marriage while Ani works to protect this new life she believes she has secured for herself. Featuring mansions, jets and joyrides, “Anora” represents a shift from Baker’s low-budget origins, like his breakout movie “Tangerine,” which was made for $100,000 and filmed on iPhones.
Though “Anora” strays from previous neorealisms in its production and scenario, its thematic focus keeps the viewer on Earth. With the given context, it is hopefully no huge spoiler to reveal that Ani’s dreams of upward mobility are not achieved by the film’s end. She is neither lifted into wealth nor dropped farther down in her position in life. Instead, the movie leaves her where it began, in her old house with the life she led before Ivan. “She has to learn this American myth isn’t real,” says Howard. And so does the audience. While the classic superhero movie can continue to serve as an escape from reality, the success of “Anora” suggests audiences are increasingly considering the movie-watching experience as an opportunity to tether themselves to reality, if only momentarily. In response to the nebulous realities of confusing political and social spaces (with more opportunities for escape than ever before via social media), perhaps realistic movies are a needed and desirable avenue to be reminded of life’s many hard truths.