Having won the Palme d’Or at Cannes back in May and now already being touted as the frontrunner in the Best Picture race for next year’s Oscars, Sean Baker’s Anora, even before it’s actually been publicly released in the US or UK, already feels like a film that’s taking a few victory laps. It deserves them. Baker’s latest take on his favourite theme of the American Dream shot through the lens of the nation’s sex workers is outrageously good – laugh out funny, always moving at a million miles an hour, and packed to bursting with some of the year’s most enjoyable performances.
The centre of gravity around which all these performances revolve is Mikey Madison, probably best known for either her brief role as a Manson acolyte in Once Upon A Time Hollywood or as one of the killers from the fifth Scream, who plays the eponymous Anora, who prefers to go by Ani, in a truly star-making display. From minute one, she’s magnetic, the queen of her little slice of New York as she works the night away as a stripper (and more, for those who can really pay). Madison is always finding performances within performances, tapping into the chameleonic improvisation central to Ani’s trade, by turns hilarious, seductive, furious, and vulnerable, all while keeping a core flame of ambition and survival instinct consistently burning.
We follow Ani across a particularly chaotic couple of weeks in the dead of winter from late December to early January as her life is upended by Vanya (Mark Eydelshteyn), the 21 year old playboy idiot son of a Russian oligarch who takes a liking to Ani, quickly marrying her on impulse on a Vegas trip and then bringing the wrath of his parents down upon them both. It’s probably the grandest, most involved *plot* that Baker’s ever written and it absolutely barrels along, starting as a sleazy Cinderella story before becoming a wild-eyed, underslept quasi-thriller farce without ever skipping a tonal beat.
Alongside Madison, Eydelshteyn also proves himself a star in the making, crass and cowardly yet oddly sweet, while the goons Vanya’s parents send to secure an annulment – long-suffering Armenian priest/fixer Toros (Karren Karagulian), his moron brother Garnik (Vache Tovmasyan), and good-natured enforcer Igor (Yura Borisov) – are irresistibly hilarious. The physicality of literally every single performance in Anora is incredible; characters bounce and slide and bumble around like their DNA is half cartoon and it’s just endlessly entertaining simply watching them move through the world.
Anora is Baker’s first New York-set film since 2008, and his current vision of the city is clearly influenced by how the Safdies in particular have shot it in the intervening years. Sound and chaos spin around the characters, who are always speaking, yelling, and swearing over one another – Baker is remarkably un-precious about having a lot of his really excellent writing being possible to miss within the verbal melees of every scene. Dialogue here is funny, profane, and always illuminating new things about its characters; a sequence in which Toros accidentally becomes the group ‘dad’ while Ani, Igor, and Garnik bicker during a search for Vanya is magic.
Fitting in with the Cinderella theme, Anora is hardly a grim and gritty look into its milieu – the only time Ani feels physically unsafe in the movie is during the first encounter with the goons, never at her job or hanging out with Vanya – but Baker does have bigger ideas in his back pocket about power, privilege, and money. The whole story is really just a sidenote for Vanya and his parents a crazy and embarrassing story to tell in the future, but for Ani, this is an upending of her entire life, a life that is an easy plaything for someone with real wealth.
It’s in keeping this issue bobbing along throughout the whole film that Baker earns his complex final scene, sad yet hopeful and a moment of eerie quiet in a film that has been pure noise up to that point. It’s a down note to go out on after such an exhilarating two-or-so hours but, after sitting with it for a bit, it is the perfect, maybe only, way to honestly bring this frantic fairytale to an end.
Jack Blackwell – Film Reviews 