I’ve been reading about Anora ever since the movie won the Palm d'Or at this year’s Cannes Film Festival and began catapulting its way around the festival circuit. My initial anticipation was sparked not only by an award but by the movie’s pedigree. Anora is the work of Sean Baker, a director whose The Florida Project I admired for its specificity and down-to-earth credibility.
Baker’s interests tend to be married to narrow forms of realism that resonate beyond each movie’s carefully chosen setting. His movies are about specific places -- Los Angeles in Tangerine -- but they're also about characters who struggle with chaotic forms of living -- the transgender sex worker in the same movie.
In Anora, Baker immerses himself in Brighton Beach, a Brooklyn enclave defined by its community of Russian emigres and business people. If that description makes it sound as if Baker plans to chart an inspirational course through immigration issues, think again.
Baker builds his movie around an American-born woman who works in a nightclub that specializes in lap dances, some held in private VIP rooms.
In what rightly has been described as a breakthrough performance, Mikey Madison plays Anora, a woman who’d like to escape the sex-worker grind. Ambition aside, Anora does her job with convincing enthusiasm. She’s not embarrassed by her work and has learned how to sell herself.
The story’s pivotal event occurs when Anora meets Ivan (Mark Eydelshteyn), a 21-year-old Russian club patron who’s goofy and immature. As it turns out, Ivan is also the son of a powerful Russian oligarch. Happy to pay for sex, he’s so taken with Anora — who calls herself Ani — that he offers to pay her $15,000 to spend a week him. They’ll party, take drugs, have sex, and party some more.
Ably created by Eydelshteyn as a kid who's nothing but loose ends, Ivan lives in a beautifully appointed modern home in a gated community. His ocean view offers a stark contrast to Ani’s apartment. She and her sister share a dingy flat next to subway tracks where trains rumble their insult past smudged windows. Ani needs the money, does her sex duties willingly, and enjoys her new exposure to the high life.
Early on, the movie feels like a giddy party that includes a major bash at Ivan’s home, trips to upscale clubs, romps on the beaches of Coney Island, and a stay at a luxurious Las Vegas hotel where Ivan is a regular customer. The characters take a deep dive into what seems to be an inexhaustible supply of drugs.
We're not sure what to make of it when Ivan proposes and the couple hurries through a Las Vegas wedding. Suddenly, Ani is living the dream, much to the envy of at least one of her former co-workers.
We wait for the fall of the other shoe, the hard kick that will shatter Ani’s dreams, but Baker is too shrewd to crash the gates of formula. Instead, he turns Anora into a near-hysterical comedy, bringing a farcical tone to the increasingly wild proceedings.
A time bomb ticks beneath the story’s surface. Ivan’s disapproving parents are about to arrive in New York to nullify their notoriously irresponsible son's marriage.
Enter a cohort of subservient family employees who, with Ani in tow, must locate the fleeing Ivan. He runs off without Ani at the suggestion that he’s about to be transported back to Russia. Sans Ivan, there can be no annulment.
Included in this gaggle are an Armenian (Karen Karagulian) who works as the loyal family fixer and two henchmen (Vache Tovmasyan and Yura Borisov). Hired as the muscle of the group, Borisov's Igor has a disarming soulful quality that throws us off guard.
The Brighton bumblers fail to take Ani’s toughness into account. A scene in Ivan’s apartment turns into an explosive comic brawl in which Ani holds her own. Baker allows the scene to play out as the mayhem spirals out of control.
Eventually, Ivan’s father (Aleksey Serebryakov) and mother (Daryl Ekamasova) arrive in New York to retrieve their wayward son. Ivan's no-nonsense, steely mom makes no bones about asserting her authority. Ani isn't impressed.
Madison handles her role with bold confidence. She ignites sparks of humanity that keep Ani from becoming a caricature, and Baker continues his exploration of boisterous nihilistic situations that resist easy compartmentalization.
Anora brings us into a tipsy, fascinating, ethnically specific world where Brooklyn funk and obscene amounts of money create an intoxicating mix that can be funny, bitter, and impressively true to itself.
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