Midway through “Anora,” Sean Baker’s screwball Cinderella story, Ivan (Mark Eydelshteyn), the son of a Russian oligarch, runs off from the extravagant southern Brooklyn mansion owned by his parents. His new bride, the title character known as Ani (Mikey Madison), and his handlers spend much of the rest of the movie in pursuit, a chaotic chase that culminates at the Manhattan strip club where Ani dances.
In December, I took that ride in more or less reverse with Baker, who wrote and directed, and his location manager, Ross Brodar. The trip was one way of gaining an appreciation of just how much geography informs the film’s madcap humor and class commentary. Starting at the strip club in Midtown and wending around the Belt Parkway in Brooklyn, past the Parkview Diner, Coney Island and Brighton Beach en route to the mansion in Mill Basin that played Ivan’s home, you get a survey of high and low, the borough at its most touristy and its most exclusive.
“I try to do that with my films, try to show stuff that’s hidden in plain sight — areas that haven’t been shot out,” Baker said.
Follow along on our tour:
Ani’s WorkplaceRosewood Theater and HQ KONY, West 38th Street, Manhattan
Headquarters, or HQ, Ani’s workplace, is a hybrid of two clubs that share a building and a back staircase. Each provided the movie with a different vibe.
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Robinson’s history of comments that have been widely criticized as antisemitic and anti-gay made him a deeply polarizing figure in North Carolina long before his bid for governor was upended last week by a CNN report that he had called himself a “Black NAZI” and praised slavery while posting on a pornographic website between 2008 and 2012. Now, some of his allies are abandoning him. Most of his senior campaign staff members have resigned. The Republican Governors Association said that its pro-Robinson ads would expire tomorrow and that no new ones had been placed. And former President Donald Trump, who endorsed Robinson in the spring, calling him “Martin Luther King on steroids,” did not mention him once during his rally in the state over the weekend.
Mr. Biden even held on to hope for the transformative peace deal for the Middle East that he thought was within grasp a year ago, believing it could survive even as the war between Hamas and Israel tore at its foundations.
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