Sean Baker’s chaotic, funny and profane anti-fairytale about a Brooklyn sex worker came just under the hype for me, but I still found plenty to love about it, including Mikey Madison’s outstanding lead performance.
Hype can be a double-edged sword. I’ve been looking forward to Anora for months, and it’s practically impossible to keep your high expectations in check when a movie has a Palme d’Or trophy on top of all other acclaim. I had far too many reservations with Anora to call it a knockout; for one thing it’s overlong by at least twenty minutes and there were at least couple of times when I vaguely wished for it to finish already. It does redeem itself at the very end, with an ambiguous last scene that’s bleak, hopeful, uncomfortable and heart-breaking all at once, a gut punch that will definitely stick in my memory.
Mikey Madison is Anora, or Ani as she prefers to call herself, a tough-talking, spirited sex worker in early twenties. She dances at a Manhattan strip club and occasionally makes exclusive escort arrangements on the side. The movie opens with a montage of Ani going about her work, where Sean Baker’s strengths as a filmmaker are instantly obvious to a newcomer like myself. The scenes are matter-of-fact but not detached, on the contrary, they feel vibrantly alive and lived-in, shot through a compassionate, humanist lens.
One day, Ani hits what looks like a jackpot. Enter Ivan or Vanya (Mark Eydelshteyn), a weedy twenty-one-year-old son of a Russian oligarch, a spoilt man-child with little on his brain besides sex, video games, drugs and fun times. Ani understands Russian better than she speaks it – her Russian is so halting and heavily accented I needed subtitles to understand her – but Vanya doesn’t mind and the two hit it off. Vanya hires Ani to come to his gated mansion, then offers her $15,000 to be his “horny girlfriend” for the week.
The frenetic scenes that follow fully capture what would happen if you took the uninhibited exuberance of the early twenties and multiplied it by wealth beyond imagination. As Vanya parties with Ani and friends, he makes a couple of impulsive, life-changing decisions: the merry bunch end up going to Las Vegas, where Vanya pops a question to Ani. There’s no talk of love. To Vanya the marriage is a chance to stay in the USA and avoid the clutches of his parents who expect him to contribute to family business in Russia, for Ani it’s a working-class Cinderella story come true. For a short while, high on champagne and cocaine, they can convince themselves that this transactional fairytale might actually work.
Their blissful fantasy collapses faster than an underdone souffle once Vanya’s parents learn about the marriage and board their private plane. In the meantime, Vanya’s godfather Toros, a local Armenian priest, is ordered to find the couple and arrange an annulment. When he arrives at the mansion with a couple of thugs, Anora turns into a foul-mouthed, uproariously funny comedy that at times borders on slapstick. In this movie, the rich do what they will and people like Ani are little more than a nuisance to toss aside, but she will rage and bite and scream all the way.
As Anora veers from fantasy to comedy to sober, harsh reality, Baker’s deftness at mixing wildly disparate tones is truly admirable. His commitment to authenticity also means that my Russian bullshit radar never went up once, with real Russian actors cast in the parts (the authentic approach also includes a copious amount of hardcore Russian swearing, which I haven’t heard onscreen in a very long time). Later in the story, the film goes on a chaotic tour of Brooklyn’s Brighton Beach, where Soviet nostalgia is still alive in restaurants and nightclubs. It’s been a while since I’ve been to a Russian restaurant here in Melbourne, but this section left me with the same feeling of familiarity mixed with a teensy bit of cultural cringe.
Mikey Madison’s fiery lead performance deserves all the praise in the world, and the camera clearly adores her face, with extraordinary eyes that pull you in. However, to me Ani’s pure charisma and fierceness couldn’t cover up how little she drives the plot and how passive her role is despite the defiant front. Her helplessness in the face of wealth and privilege is of course part of the point, but the way she’s literally turned into a backseat passenger for a long stretch in her own movie rubbed me the wrong way. The most compelling character in the second half is actually Igor (Yura Borisov), who at first comes off as a simple shaven-headed hoodlum, then reveals a more sensitive side as he picks up on Ani’s hidden vulnerability. He may not talk a great deal, but his silent reactions to Ani’s plight speak volumes.
A second watch could perhaps make me revise my opinion, but for now I think of Anora as almost-great rather than great. I was however thoroughly entertained, and it did make me interested in checking out more of Sean Baker’s movies.
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