Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / Eight years ago, Kelly Reichardt’s exquisitely penetrating Certain Women appeared. A singularly nuanced and resolutely independent filmmaker, she patrols the interstices of American history and contemporary society. In this movie, she presented several game female Montanans who couldn’t afford to have feminism on their minds and nonetheless lived reckonable lives – a perspective that she had established sharply in Wendy and Lucy (2008) and reiterated softly in Showing Up (2022). Judging by several recent independent films, Reichardt’s subtle perspective has had lasting influence in framing the quandary of how women establish agency in a society that still – or at least again – often militates against them.
The uncannily atmospheric Janet Planet, celebrated playwright Annie Baker’s first feature film, sets a kind of generational baseline. A halting divorcée (Julianne Nicholson, just right) tries to follow the bohemian script of western Massachusetts in summer 1991 while raising a willful and precocious 11-year-old daughter and finding the right balance of personal assertiveness and countercultural sensitivity. Baker imbues the film with a washed-out casualness – of a piece with the TV series Portlandia – that quietly radiates hope for the future and the tentative promise, wistfully associated with the nineties, of a less contested and more tolerant world. If only it had come to pass. Such concerns are also implicit in Nathan Silver’s wryly disruptive Between the Temples. Ben, a tragically widowed upstate synagogue cantor (Jason Schwartzman, in his element), feels imprisoned by his family and community’s cloyingly judgmental solicitude. He gets blotto at a local bar and encounters his childhood music teacher Carla – an inspired Carol Kane, still exuding the offbeat sexuality she patented in Hester Street and Taxi. She infiltrates his life on the pretext of seeking a belated bat mitzvah, which he agrees to supervise. To the dismay of his cohort, they tumble into love. While the film centers on Ben’s plight, its narrative piston is Carla’s obliviousness to convention in the service of happiness, however jarring it may be to the unadventurous.
Nora Fingscheidt’s visually stunning The Outrun, based on Amy Liptrot’s eponymous memoir, is about young woman named Rona’s nihilistic addiction, and it is instantly canonical. The plot is schematically familiar: unruly and reckless binge-drinking, rock bottom, rehab, a slip, another stab at sobriety. But the non-linear storytelling, sharply juxtaposing grim recovery with vile drunkenness, and Saoirse Ronan’s layered and comprehensively winning performance uniquely illuminate the co-location of capacities for tranquility and rage and the addict’s doubt – so puzzling to the unafflicted – that she cannot be happy when sober. Rona returns from London home to the Orkneys to confront formative family demons – in particular, her father’s schizophrenia and bipolar disease and her mother’s piousness – then decamps to a remote isle where she discovers an ambient mysticism of nature that she hadn’t appreciated and resolves to study seaweed and develop its environmental virtues. This noble solution may seem too pat, even trite. But Fingscheidt’s deft script and Ronan’s perfect calibration – her epiphanic buoyancy could suggest a manic episode – don’t allow any firm inference that Rona will conclusively overcome. One day at a time, indeed.
Anora – Sean Baker’s tour de force Palme d’Or winner involving the ill-fated marriage of a cocky, gum-snapping Brighton Beach stripper and the libertine coke-addicted son of a Russian oligarch – compares with the Safdie Brothers’ brilliant and under-appreciated Uncut Gems in its frenetic pace, unapologetic vulgarity, frequent hilariousness, and stealthy depth. It provides an impressively complex and subtle portrait of a certain incarnation of a 2020s American woman, brought home by Mikey Madison’s bravura breakout performance in the title role as well as Baker’s turbocharged self-assurance. Anora is whipsawed between the male demand for physical gratification and her own insistence on self-sufficiency, reconciling the two by monetizing her allure and, off-the-books, the sex she can provide. When the oligarch’s kid becomes momentarily smitten – it helps that she has Russian roots and gingerly speaks the language – he impulsively proposes marriage, which occurs in Vegas. Anora sees that too as a transaction but soon tires of being screwed like a whore, asking him to “slow it down.” His parents are as outraged as he is feckless, and task their own three stooges to secure an annulment, which they do in a madcap bolt around Brooklyn. Considering the marriage a prize she has won, Anora resists, hurling cruel abuse at all three functionaries but especially Igor (an endearing Yuri Borisov), though he is the only character who sees past her opportunism and folly to vulnerability and sadness. He is unwaveringly kind even as he pays her off. Echoing far beyond its particular dramatic circumstances, Anora’s final moment of recognition is an exemplar of naturalistic acting and perhaps the most hard-earned scene in cinema this year.
Janet Planet, directed and written by Annie Baker. Distributed by A24, 2023.
Between the Temples, directed and co-written by Nathan Silver. Distributed by Sony Pictures Classics, 2024.
The Outrun, directed and co-written by Nora Fingscheidt. Distributed by StudioCanal, 2024.
Anora, directed and written by Sean Baker. Distributed by Neon, 2024.
About the author: Jonathan Stevenson is a New York-based policy analyst, editor, and writer, contributing to the New York Times, the New York Review of Books, and Politico, among other publications, and a regular contributor to Two Coats of Paint.
