Written and directed by Sean Baker
A collection of powerhouse performances led by Mikey Madison electrifies Anora, another of Sean Baker’s bittersweet portraits of sex workers and their misadventures; characters jostle to say their piece, and their actors take turns in the spotlight, their combined trapeze act overcoming a storyline that bloats along the middle and threatens to drag things along the streets of Brighton Beach where we lay our scene.
Madison is the eponymous Anora, or Ani, as she prefers to be called, a sex worker plying her trade in a gentleman’s club. One night, Vanya, a guest, requests someone Russian-speaking to entertain him, and the connection between Ani and Vanya is, like so many others found at the strip club, instant and overwhelming. Funny how that works. Is it real, enduring, even ever-lasting?
Ani soon learns Vanya is a Russian oligarch’s son, and Mark Eidelshtein delivers a stellar performance as this gold-plated lover boy, his lanky body and whispery chest hair only pretending at adulthood. Eidelshtein bounces with the energy of a child who has enough money to make the world his playground and no upbringing to teach him any consequences. Before reality sets in, his giddy boy-king antics are hilarious – maybe filthy riches aren’t wasted on those who only use it for non-stop fun.
The fun comes to a screeching halt once his parents get wise to the news he has married Ani, Vegas-style, and goons are dispatched to rend them asunder. Will love win out?
Madison is incredible as Ani, and the performance is poised to be a genuine breakthrough, only she’s so good you worry you can believe her as anyone else. Fantasies are the fuel of Anora and you don’t blame Vanya for buying the fantasy that is Ani, as Madison will steam up any room that you watch Anora in, but she’s also fierce, fun, and radiates the devotion to her beau’s happiness that is the purview of anyone who’s a master provider of the girlfriend experience.
Whether by design or negligence, it’s nonetheless surprising how auspicious Madison’s performance is given how flat a character Ani is, a fact made especially glaring by how detailed many minor characters are. There’s little internality to be found with Ani, and Baker gets distracted with his supporting cast, meaning Anora becomes mostly plot-driven, and Ani’s whisked along.
This becomes clear for the middle hour of Baker’s film, where Madison joins Karren Karagulian, Vache Tovmasyan, and Yura Borisov as Toros, Garnick, and Igor, the three goons sent to by Vanya’s parents, on a goose chase through New York. It means Anora is on the whole another straightforward affair from Baker’s pen but the pace and collective circus act put on by his cast keeps you interested throughout the chaos that at times reaches the stress levels of Uncut Gems.
Delusion is by now a common trait of Baker’s characters. They delude themselves, like Simon Rex did in Red Rocket, the story of a washed-up porn star who believes a comeback is possible, or they’re deluded by others, as is the case for Moonee, the child at the heart of The Florida Project, who frolics unaware of her mother’s increasingly desperate attempts to make ends meet.
Ani’s on this spectrum too, but she both supplies and indulges delusion. The extent to which her affection for Vanya is real is anyone’s guess, adding a mystery element ripe for discussion, but Ani’s a victim too – naive to how much power the dollar wields when there’s enough of it, and how brazenly the powers that be wield their influence. In general, this has given Baker’s films the quality of candy, alluring and inviting to the eye, but hiding a sour core that dominates the aftertaste. The same is true of Anora, and the reticence on Baker’s behalf when it comes to Ani leaves room for us to ponder, and Madison’s performance makes you keen to do so.
As beholden to Baker’s usual habits that Anora is, it also hints at an evolution. He has not always been one for outright pathos, but Anora does witness an embrace. It’s a good development for Baker, who clearly does have an affinity for marginalized existences, in particular sex workers, but it’s a shame this brief glimpse comes so late, the preceding hours spent more on the fantasy and fanfare than the cold shoulder we all knew was there all along.
Mikkel Frederiksen 