Anora
Directed by Sean Baker
Running time: 2hr19 | REVIEWED BY GUY LODGE
Mikey Madison in Anora
Reason one of many to love the work of American writer-director Sean Baker: he likes to kick off his films with a little fluorescent sugar rush of pure pop. In The Florida Project, it was the assaultive wedding-disco cheer of Kool & the Gang’s “Celebration”, setting the tone for a child’s-eye view of wonder amid woe; Red Rocket, meanwhile, introduced its on-the-outs porn star protagonist with the faux-snarling kiss-off of NSync’s “Bye Bye Bye”, well before Marvel turned the song viral. Least predictably of all, however, Baker’s antsy, dizzy, altogether dazzling new film Anora begins with the earnest inspirational balladry of Take That’s “Greatest Day”, as Gary Barlow’s flutey trill improbably soars over a neon-lit tracking shot of exotic dancers writhing over their clients in a seamy Brooklyn gentlemen’s club. Are we about to watch the world come alive tonight, as Barlow implores us to do? Yes, though probably not in the way he’s thinking.
It’s the kind of garishly heart-swelling firework display of a song that other films would instead choose to end on, which is apt enough, given that the first act of Anora would be the last in many a fairytale romance. It’s as if Baker got to the end of Pretty Woman (where Richard Gere’s sleek corporate dullard rescues Julia Roberts’ sassy streetwalker, and she, per its famous last line, rescues him right back) and asked, “Sure, but then what?” Out in the real world, or at least the fast, scuzzy real-world facsimile of Anora, nobody ascends that rapidly from rags to riches without paying some kind of price.
Not that the film’s title character, a spiky, opportunistic Russian-American sex worker played with volatile wildcat energy by Mikey Madison, is in the market for true love alone. When she’s assigned to callow oligarch scion Ivan (a grimly hilarious Mark Eydelshteyn) in the club because she speaks Russian, dollar signs light up in her eyes. When he offers her $15,000 to be his girlfriend for the week, it’s an easy yes from her. When he whisks her off to Vegas and suggests they marry, well, why the hell not? It’s the beauty of Baker’s script — both riotous and melancholy — and Madison’s quicksilver performance — both canny and vulnerable — that Anora (or Ani, as she prefers to be known) is neither a total naif nor an uncompromising gold-digger in this scenario: she’s willing to fall in love if that gets her what she wants.
Ivan, seeking a green card to escape his parents’ control, isn’t quite so emotionally agile, and soon goes AWOL — leaving Ani in the violent care of his minders, including a watchful Russian minion (beautifully played by Compartment No. 6 star Yura Borisov) who may be her white knight or her further ruin. And so Baker’s film enters unmoored, unchartered post-Cinderella territory, pitting an admittedly unromantic American dream against realities of patriarchy and capitalism that are more cynical still. It’s a hard, heady tale, though Baker’s storytelling is so swift and lithe, his ear for comedy within tragedy so bright and wicked, that the film never feels like a parable or a social tract. As Ani trips and tumbles around Brooklyn’s wintry, unsexy underworld in search of her barely-husband, Anora takes on the frenzied whirligig momentum of vintage Hollywood farce, minus any satiny glamour or all’s-well-that-ends-well promise. Call it screwball realism, with a choke nested in every belly-laugh.
Baker is often referred to a kind of cinematic patron saint for certain shamed-and-sidelined American demographics — from the trans sex workers of Tangerine to the destitute motel denizens of The Florida Project — and if such descriptions can verge on the patronising, his films never do. Anora regards its outsiders with compassion, yes, but also with keen, hungry, sometimes nosy human interest, equally fascinated by their failings and their saving graces, curious as to how they see a world that barely gives them a second glance. You can veritably feel the blisters forming as the film walks a mile, and then a couple more, in Ani’s sodden, teetering skyscraper boots — not toward any Disneyland castle or tidily happy ending, but another day, another opportunity, that might yet be the greatest of a grinding lot.
ANORA (2024) Written by Sean Baker | Shot by Drew Daniels | Edited by Sean Baker