Review: ANORA

 by Rob DiCristino

Call her “Ani.”

The cinema of Sean Baker is the cinema of survival. His characters are hustlers and grifters, rise-and-grind ne’er-do-wells scraping and clawing at the edges of polite society who routinely risk life and limb just to secure the basic conveniences that the rest of us take for granted. Across his filmography — painfully human and often hilariously transgressive fare like The Florida Project, Tangerine, and Red Rocket — Baker illustrates the systemic inequalities that make a lie of the American Dream, the punishing distance between ends that his characters can’t ever seem to make meet. You might not think of these people as heroes, necessarily — hell, it’s hard to feel anything but contempt for someone like Red Rocket’s reckless narcissist Mikey Davies — but Sean Baker isn’t interested in sugarcoating the way our economic realities often force us to compromise our moralistic fantasies. Colorful, eccentric, and vulgar though they may be, his misfits are just mirrors held up to the masses, an honest reflection of anyone in the audience brave enough to look back.

His latest misfit is a twenty-three-year-old Brooklyn sex worker named Ani (Once Upon a Time in Hollywood standout Mikey Madison), whom we meet mid-lap dance at an upscale Manhattan strip club called HQ. Ani — no one dares call her Anora — has the exact mix of beauty and ferocity necessary for this particular hustle, an effortless blend of allure and authority that keeps her clients pinballing between the ATM and the VIP room for hours on end. She also happens to understand Russian, which makes her HQ’s MVP when the hard-partying son of a powerful Russian oligarch (Mark Eydelshteyn as Vanya) and his entourage come to play. Ani makes quick work of Vanya — whom we sense has never worked a day in his life — and agrees to meet him for a more intimate one-on-one at his opulent Brighton Beach mansion. Within minutes, Vanya is pitching Ani a Pretty Woman: $10,000 to be his girlfriend for the week. Hell, 10K for a few jittery thrusts between Call of Duty sessions for seven days? Ani’s no dummy. But that’ll be 15K, Vanya. In cash. Up front.

That’s where the Pretty Woman comparisons end, though. Ani is a Sean Baker creation, after all, which means that while she’s happy to cash in, she isn’t about to forget every lesson she’s learned in her short but arduous life. She’s not going to give up her hard-earned agency just because Vanya proposes marriage during a drug-fueled excursion to Vegas. Oh, she says yes, of course — how many times do I have to tell you that Ani’s no dummy? — but this transaction will be executed on her terms: Three karats, Vanya, maybe even four. Still, after years of being forced by circumstance to harden herself to genuine vulnerability, Ani does begin to see a crude facsimile of love in this arrangement, so much so that when Vanya’s handlers (Yura Borisov, Vache Tovmasyan, and Karren Karagulian) show up with orders to annul the marriage — compelling Vanya to flee the house on foot — our recalcitrant missus refuses to accept a settlement and instead joins the goons on an odyssey into the city to find their idiot princeling and make things right before his parents arrive in the morning. True love or not, Ani will get her due.

Humming with all the bravery, honesty, and rebellious enthusiasm that has colored Baker’s filmography from the beginning, Anora is his finest work yet, a transcendent indictment of the dehumanizing power of capitalism doubling as a riotous, madcap comedy far too high on its own kinetic energy to waste time preaching on a soapbox. We don’t need to be told that Ani is making a catastrophic series of mistakes, and Baker never once looks down on her for doing so. We don’t need to be told that Vanya is a spoiled brat who wouldn’t know a lasting consequence if it came up and kicked him in his coke-addled nuts, and Baker never once pretends he’s going to change. We don’t need to be told that these henchmen dragging Ani across the Big Apple are just working stiffs trying to get by, and Baker never once pretends that they’re cackling villains with sinister intent. That’s because Baker’s universe is populated by human beings, imperfect and exhausted, banding together to survive the chaos unleashed upon them by an ignorant, uncaring ruling class. In other words, us.

Mikey Madison was born to play Ani, and it's a privilege to watch her become a movie star in real time, to see her walk the delicate line between youthful belligerence and pregnable grace with such poise, confidence, and — if what must have been months of pole-dancing classes are any indication — strength. Mark Eydelshteyn delivers some of the film’s funniest lines and gives Vanya a childlike exuberance that has to be seen to be believed, but it’s Yura Borisov has who has the hardest job of all, that of a nearly-silent sentry whose inherent moral fortitude begins to make a kind of conciliatory sense out of all the madness around him as the night goes on. His Igor’s attention to Ani’s well-being starts as a slow simmer before boiling over into the most heartbreaking ending of the year, and it’s through their interactions that Baker’s thesis develops into his ultimate statement on class solidarity: We’ve all been seduced by opportunity, but those of us who work — be it sex work or any other kind — will continue to do so, and it’s how we share that burden that will determine the true value of our lives.

Anora hits wide theatrical release on Friday, November 1st.