Originally posted May 21, 2024
Renowned for his lusty, humane, non-judgmental depictions of sex workers, porn stars, drug dealers, and other underclass outsiders, American indie writer-director Sean Baker returns to some familiar themes in Anora, but adds a fresh twist or two. Selected for the main Cannes competition for the second time, the prize-winning director of Tangerine (2015), The Florida Project (2017) and Red Rocket (2021) here gives us another sympathetic blue-collar heroine scraping a living on the margins of the American Dream, only this time he puts her in direct collision with ultra-wealthy characters and lets the sparks fly. For once, Baker explains in his Cannes publicity, he wanted to “make a film about rich people”.
The resulting chemical reaction is fizzy and volatile, but not quite the explosive cocktail it might have been. An overlong runtime, underwritten characters and some uneasy tonal wobbles dampen the film’s punchy humour and propulsive energy. A story riven with clashing class, gender and cultural issues also sidelines political commentary in favour of cartoon violence and screwball comedy, which can be great fun but leaves scant lingering aftertaste. Anora is Baker’s largest-budget production yet, though still modest by mainstream measures, with a simple Cinderella plot that could translate into commercial breakthrough. It’s a blast while it lasts, but less of a gritty, splashy, provocative statement than some of the director’s previous works.
Mikey Madison (Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Scream) gives great tough-as-nails diva as Anora, aka Ani, a 25-year-old lap-dancer and sometime escort living around the Brighton Beach area of Brooklyn. Due to vaguely explained Uzbek family roots on the fringes of the old Soviet Union, she can speak passable Russian, making her the obvious choice to entertain big-spending 21-year-old Russian playboy Vanya (Mark Eydelshteyn) when he drops into the club where she works. Vanya is soon smitten, hiring Ani for private sex sessions, overnight stays in his flashy riverside mansion, then a week-long party vacation in a palatial Las Vegas hotel.
A super-rich oligarch’s son with a Borat-level grasp of English, Vanya radiates puppyish charm and springy energy, but he is also a spoiled, impatient, bratty man-child with major daddy and mommy issues. Still, he is generous with his money and throws the most lavish parties. He is also eager to marry an American woman to avoid being summoned back to Moscow to work in the family businesses. Just weeks into their boozy, druggy whirlwind romance, he and Ani get married, almost on a whim.
Exchanging transactional sex work for long-term romance is perhaps not the most secure future plan. Only Ani herself, and possibly Baker, seems to believe this stoned car crash of a wedding could possibly end in a Happy Ever After. For the rest of us, glaring red flags have been obvious from the first booty-shaking table dance. Sure enough, when news reaches Vanya’s family that he has arranged a “green card marriage” to a “prostitute”, all hell breaks loose.
Vanya’s livid control-freak parents instantly arrange to fly to New York on their private jet. Meanwhile they contact their local fixer Toros (Baker cast regular Karren Karagulian on mighty form), an Armenian-American Orthodox priest who is so terrified of failing his fearsome bosses that he marches out of a christening midway through. Toros and his two sidekicks, boorish Garnick (Vache Tovmaysan) and sensitive Igor (Yura Borisov), barge into Vanya’s mansion to demand he annuls the marriage. Instead, the ungallant groom flees, leaving Ani forcibly detained by three men. She fights back tooth and nail in an extended struggle that lurches uneasily between slapstick comedy and brutalising assault.
With Vanya on the run, Toros strikes a deal with a grudging Ani to help track him down and resolve the family crisis. They spend the night loudly bulldozing through the restaurants, gaming arcades and lapdance clubs around Brighton Beach. This chaotic cat-and-mouse chase ends with a comically catastrophic courtroom showdown and a return trip back to Las Vegas, with Vanya’s fabulously awful fire-breathing glamazon mother (Darya Ekamasova) cracking the whip.
More of these Succession-style family conflicts, with their clashing egos and escalating hysteria, would have made for a richer film. They work as riveting high-farce peaks, but they arrive a little too late in an oddly paced two-hours-plus narrative that gallops along in some sections, then drags in others. A more lyrical final section, which seems designed to give Ani a tender moment of closure after her traumatic ordeal as a plaything of callous mega-rich assholes, lacks conviction or firm resolution.
As an aesthetic package, Anora looks slicker than some of Baker’s more rough-edged, low-tech films. Even so, he retains his signature love of lurid neon colours, graphic sex scenes, booming rap tracks and libidinous club anthems. Familiar ingredients, all framed this time by some surprisingly poetic vistas of Brighton Beach and Coney Island.
Director, screenwriter: Sean Baker
Cast: Mikey Madison, Yura Borisov, Mark Eydelshteyn, Karren Karagulian, Vache Tovmasyan, Ivy Wolk, Darya Ekamasova, Lindsay Normington
Cinematography: Drew Daniels
Editing: Sean Baker
Music: Matthew Hearon-Smith
Production company: CRE Films
Producers: Sean Baker, Alex Coco, Samantha Quan
International sales: Filmnation Entertainment (US)
Venue: Cannes film festival (Competition)
In English, Russian
139 minutes
