There comes a point in Anora when you realize you don’t actually care much about Vanya (Mark Eydelshteyn), the spoiled son of a Russian oligarch and love interest of the title character. He’s just a dumb, reckless, immature kid addicted to sex and video games, and acting on impulse. What happens to him and with his family doesn’t matter. But you care because Ani cares, you get swept up because she gets swept up, you hold out hope for him and for their relationship because she does. She is the movie’s lightning rod for your sentiments, and fairly effortlessly so.
If anything can be especially distinct about Sean Baker’s voice as a director, it is his particular interest in and sympathy towards sex workers. His last four movies have all touched on that world in various ways looking to bring nuance to a stigmatized community. Anora is perhaps his biggest swing in this direction yet -it’s certainly his biggest movie yet, the one that netted him the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival this year, the first time it has gone to an American movie since The Tree of Life. That was a movie about the dichotomy between the origins and meaning of life and a minuscule, mundane existence. This is a romantic comedy-drama about the consequences of a stripper’s relationship and eventual shotgun wedding to the son of a powerful Russian tycoon. Yet in its way, it is no less exquisite.
Mikey Madison stars as Ani, the Brooklyn exotic dancer who strikes up a rapport with the young Vanya, a client with deep deep pockets and a particular interest in her, due to her ability to understand and speak Russian, and honestly his inability to grasp her sultry demeanour and attitude towards him as anything other than genuine affection. He is fairly naive for his libido. Ani, attracted to a cuteness in this naivety as well as his vast wealth when she visits his home, agrees to more paid sexual encounters and lavish experiences, culminating in a romantic trip to Vegas and a spontaneous marriage. This becomes an immediate problem though for Vanya’s elite family and local supervisors who furiously fight to dissolve the arrangement.
The narrative is one in which Ani traditionally would be the passive participant -Vanya is the instigator of all the conflict, it is his choices that determine so much of what happens, up to and including when his handlers break into the home (which is really his father’s), and he in desperation takes off on his own, not waiting for Ani to come with him. It is his mess and conventionally would be his story. But Baker flips the focus so we are forced to contend with Ani’s side of things, how she takes and relates to all of the drama. We’re made to understanding her feelings and glean a perspective on her choices as someone who frustratingly has little say in a lot of what she has to go through, but stands firm for herself regardless and for what she is trying to cultivate in happiness.
In a revelatory performance, Madison encapsulates this mindset and bizarre set of circumstances so well, communicating her misgivings and passions subtly while also letting loose with a torrent of emotion. She captures particularly well in the early portions the performative labour of being a stripper; the attitude, insinuation, and body language she has to adopt because of her work that Vanya so easily becomes enamoured with, and which she finds herself having to put on in every context that she is in with Vanya. And yet attached to it is that genuine thrill in the possibility that Vanya represents and the notion that their love story is on some level a fairy tale. But with no contradiction, she is completely its opposite when the shit hits the fan -and there is where Madison’s performance is the most fun, unleashing a raw anger in the character that refuses to let up even under duress.
When Vanya bolts from the mansion after his father’s goons come for him, Ani is left in the company of a trio of imbeciles, and even as they contain her she asserts herself dramatically, berating them and fighting them at every morsel of a chance. It’s cathartic and very amusing to see her challenge these goons on the points of their abject injustice. Yet led by the irate and beleaguered Toros (Karren Karagulian), the four make for a wild troupe through the middle-section of this movie, searching for Vanya -where Ani’s displeasure and uncertainty is cast in relief to the sheer flailing incompetence of the handlers, and in particular Igor (Yura Borisov), whose interactions with her are deadpan and exponentially awkward. It becomes a good guerilla comedy, very in the vein of Baker’s Tangerine, which is the movie’s closest analogue among his prior works -both in this structure and how it ultimately configures what is thought of as a meaningful relationship. Baker has a lot of fun playing through this part of the film, letting the characters’ dynamics ricochet in entertaining ways. But at the end of it is something very dismal.
Baker ended his film The Florida Project on a euphoric pilgrimage to DisneyWorld for his child protagonists, having always seen it as the north star from their squalid lives on the outskirts of Orlando. That euphoria is seen in Anora too, but early, in two sequences especially that imply a whirlwind, fairy tale romance set to Take That’s “Greatest Day”, a song that this movie emphatically stakes a claim to. But it is a feeling that runs up against reality and cannot last, which we and Ani instinctively know, though is still difficult to accept. In her defiance though she cultivates hope, again both for herself and the audience. It’s more than just an unwillingness to let the fairy tale die, it’s a desperate clutch at what she wants to believe is a real fate and love for her and a knowledge that it doesn’t have to end the way Vanya’s family seek to arrange it to -as she stresses multiple times, their marriage was one of two consenting adults of sound mind. It is only ingrained class conservatism dictating their separation. Baker draws out the process to give multiple chances for things to end another way, multiple avenues not to shatter Ani’s dreams. Because those dreams meant something, to her and a more liberated Vanya, whose will when tested is nowhere near as strong as his wife’s.
Sex plays a vital part in their relationship and in this movie, as Ani’s line of work, her chosen means of expression, and her coping mechanism. It should be noted though that Vanya is not very good at it, his eagerness often getting in the way of sustained pleasure -Ani has to coach him a couple of times. That immaturity comes up again and again, the hint of an unstable sexual foundation that Ani blinds herself to for what is beyond it. But when not having sex or partying, their time together looks utterly miserable for her, laid up against him as he plays video games. She is in control though -even with all his wealth she has that sexual power over him that acts as perhaps a buffer to all the other issues. And as soon as that buffer comes down, that power is forcefully relinquished… well, it makes all the difference for the movie’s endpoint.
A deft character study and an excellent movie, Anora is Baker’s richest yet. He and Madison generate not just sympathy but an irresistible pathos for this underdog stigmatized figure whose perspective is treated with seriousness, even reverence -whether in her sharpness or naivety, her hurt or her powerful defiance. The movie isn’t so precise as something like Tangerine, but it is more focused, blending more organically its severity with comedy. In spite of its overtones of tragedy, it is delightful as much as it is dour, full of life and ecstasy and comic bewilderment. Mikey Madison announces herself boldly as an exciting new star, and Sean Baker’s days of iPhone guerilla filmmaking are safely behind him.
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