Anora (now streaming on VOD services like Amazon Prime Video) illustrates how Sean Baker is one of modern cinema’s most vital filmmakers – if you weren’t aware of that already, exhibits A, B and C being Tangerine, The Florida Project and Red Rocket. The film, starring breakout Mikey Madison as a sex worker who finds herself in a neo-Pretty Woman situation with the mushbrained son of a Russian oligarch, won the Palme d’Or at Cannes, snagged five Golden Globe noms and is situated to make a significant run at Oscar glory. So this is Baker’s big shot, not that it truly matters, because great films almost always eclipse any accolades – and this one feels like an all-timer.
ANORA: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
The Gist: We don’t see as much of Anora in Anora, but we do see plenty of Ani. That’s by design – and in a blatantly literal sense. Madison plays both: We meet Ani as she works the room at HQ, a strip club that strikes me as being a skosh cleaner than most but not so high-end as to drive away the average guy looking for a lap dance. Ani’s good at her job: Chatting with the clientele, soliciting a trip to a private room, convincing men to walk with her to the ATM and, of course, shaking her thangs. Maybe Ani will end up with a couple of $100s in her G-string but it obviously doesn’t get her too far; Anora takes the subway back to her home that’s so close to the tracks you expect the commuter train to barrel through her bedroom, and where her annoying roommate busts her ass about picking up some milk.
Ani speaks Russian and that puts her buns in the face of Vanya (Mark Eydelshteyn), a 21-year-old Russian hardy-partier who soon invites her back to his Brooklyn mansion for an hour of paid services. She’s game for such a side gig, even though they’re wrapped up pretty quickly – she has that that was fast but I guess I’ll take it as a compliment look of bemusement on her face – and she’s lying next to him, watching as he plays video games, and asking if he wants some more action since there’s like 45 minutes left on the ol’ timeclock. Soon he offers her $10k to be his “girlfriend” for a week and she talks him up to $15k and he agrees but says she should be charging $30k. And so she gets a taste of this boy’s lifestyle – and he is indeed a boy because he grossly fails the eye test for manhood – of clubbing and massive parties and booze and drugs and impulsively piling all his friends into a private plane for a debauched trip to Vegas where Vanya proposes to Ani and she says yes and he gets her a four-carat ring and they get hitched.
So. Is it love? Um. Sure? Not quite love as we see in The Movies, but in this lowercase-m movie, love is more like real life love where we muddle around and hope we find some while all kinds of other things that are probably less important distract us from it. An earlier convo between the newlyweds goes roughly like something something I’ll get a green card if we get married blah blah and then my parents can’t tell me what to do etc. etc. but Ani kinda skates past it, seeing – well, what does she see, exactly? So many things, but the big thing is a new life, maybe one with significantly less side-eyeing roommates and workplace drama (via Lindsey Normington, playing Ani’s jealous-rival stripper) and significantly more elevators in your house.
Ani’s cuddled next to Vanya with a bored look as he hammers the Xbox controller when KNOCK KNOCK KNOCK. Word got out that Vanya went AWOL and got married so his parents – Russian billionaires, yikes – sent some guys to investigate. Toros (Karren Karagulian) is Vanya’s godfather, a minister who has to exit smack in the middle of a baptism to deal with this issue. By his side are Garnick (Vache Tovmasyan) and Igor (Yura Borisov), apparently his muscle. There’s screaming and yelling and broken furniture, and calling certain people “whore” and “prostitute” followed by vehement exhortations about how Vanya is her husband and there ain’t shit anyone can do about it. This is when Vanya bolts out the door and escapes, and when Toros sits down next to Ani and dictates how she’s going to cooperate with the pending annulment. She fights and fights and fights and agrees to help find Vanya and fights and fights and fights and they spend all night trying to track down the stupidass kid. One hint from me to you: Keep an eye on Igor and his little facial expressions as he lurks along the edge of the frame. Something’s going on there.
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Good Time sidles up to Pretty Woman at the bar. “Can I buy you a drink?” Good Time asks. “Sure, but it’s really gonna cost ya,” Pretty Woman replies with a smile.
Performance Worth Watching: All of the everything that is Anora/Ani lives within Madison’s performance, and superlatives like “spirited” and “brassy” don’t do her justice – the character is a knotty entanglement of ambition, need and desire who’s in this situation not for love or luxury but something bigger, deeper and more complicated. She works the gray areas deftly, while Borisov watches, defying our assumptions about hired goons, and Karagulian and Tovmasyan find the sweet spot between intimidating fixers and bumbling clowns. Put the three of them in an SUV searching for an AWOL drunk-and-high rich kid, and the result is potent comedy.
Memorable Dialogue: “Shlyukha? Your mutha’s a shlyukha!” – Ani
Sex and Skin: Yes: various stripper sequences, bottomless, topless, rutting, nearly all of it.
Our Take: Cinderella and Pretty Woman are bullshit fairytales. At least they are in 2024, where Prince Charmings are more likely to be wayward, immature and keenly empty little shitbirds like Vanya, whose mothers – in this case, a rather nasty one, played by Darya Akamasova – insist, “My son won’t apologize to anyone.” Of course, there’s no law against falling in love with a Vanya type, who might be sweet and thoughtful and funny somewhere amidst all the short-sightedness and lazy entitlement. But as I posited earlier, is this love or simply cold, hard opportunity? What’s going on between Ani’s ears?
A lot, as it turns out. Your interpretations may vary, and that suggestiveness is the film’s greatest asset. I see perhaps an identity conflict, where Anora may have found an opportunity to let Ani, who’s the object of so much desire, dissolve away – or become the dominant personality, with a massive rock on her finger and a sable coat on her shoulders. Bigger than that is her chance to jump from an all-too-real lower socioeconomic rung to Easy Street, if the one-percenter caste system will let her, and of course it won’t. If there’s love between them, its chances of survival are nil, like the hope of a pristine white rose poking through the ash and rubble of armageddon. Ani’s story is a battle of realism vs. idealism. Guess which one wins?
Yet I need to be clear: Anora may be a heavyweight film, but it’s still uproariously funny, a surprisingly tense physical comedy whose cynical undercurrent isn’t wholly bereft of light. The promise of happiness – sadly, I might add – might just come to those who stay in their lane, and I’ll say no more lest I betray the movie’s sly surprises. The first act sets up the fascinating Ani-Vanya dynamic, the second left-turns into an all-nighter goose chase that’s the year’s funniest stretch of film, and the third marks the arrival of Vanya’s parents and the power they wield, with an extended denouement that deftly encapsulates the movie’s themes in a lengthy final shot rendered profound by our ability to see it as either heartbreaking or hopeful.
As ever, Baker masterfully captures the textures of setting while inspiring his cast to do extraordinary, career-defining work. Many will talk about that middle section, on its own a hyper-tense comedy down the evolutionary line from Scorsese’s After Hours; you’ll laugh not just to break the tension, but because each individual performance is derived from extreme desperation. It’s a deliciously unpredictable film as unhinged as it is sneakily literary, a profoundly contemporary portrait of a woman’s attempt to break her myriad chains that adheres to precisely zero of the cliches we may affix to such stories.
Our Call: Anora is the best film of 2024. STREAM IT.
John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
