Released 2024. Director: Sean Baker
A MILD CAUTION IF YOU'RE LIKELY TO GET bothered with exposed skin on screen. There’ll be bare breasts, you can't miss them; there'll be nudity, lots of times, and sex, just because. The opening scene features half-naked exotic dancers gyrating and grinding against the crotches of their clients. This is just the director setting the scene. Still to come, not just physical nudity but more so, the naked emotions from the title character is particularly intense as the stakes increase. More on that later. Let’s start with the story.
Lap dancer Anora, or as she prefers to call herself, Ani, meets Ivan, son of a Russian oligarch. He seems to like her a lot and extends an invitation for private business at his swanky mansion. 21-year-old Ivan is spending his final two weeks in America in extravagance, gushing greenbacks as if they’re expiring. On a whim, he takes Ani and a bunch of party pals on a first-class trip to Las Vegas and there, the two impulsively get married. The youthful romance is intoxicating for a moment as we see the newlyweds bask in a glow of joy and abandonment, but you could tell a happy ending is far away for we’re only halfway through the movie.
Ivan’s angry parents in Russia get wind of the nuptials and dispatch their local lackeys in New York to sort out the mess. Under pressure, Ivan reveals the little shit he really is and promptly abandons his bride (coitus interrupted, I might add), fleeing to save himself thus leaving an infuriated Ani to fend against the burly henchmen.
Ani’s fire-breathing struggle against the goons led by an irritable Armenian priest Toros as they try to restrain her and find Ivan flips the rom-com vibes into something else entirely. Baker takes the turn of events to the brink of absurdity and pulls it back just at the razor’s edge of farce. For the next hour, the situation develops in complexity organically with plenty of energy and surprises.
The prevailing take – including that of a number of critics – up to this point is to describe the movie as a Cinderella romance, that Ani and Ivan have fallen head over heels for each other. I beg to differ. Ivan may pass for a Timothee Chalamet lookalike but real love has nothing to do with this whirlwind entanglement. Maybe for a few moments there’s some sort of attraction between the two but it’d be fleeting. Half the time Ivan’s ADHD-affected behaviour is befuddled with class-A narcotics, the other half he spends glued to video games or banging Ani like a demented horny rabbit. Ani is too smart and pragmatic to be gullible. Even if she entertains passing notions of romance Ani must know that fortune has fallen in her lap and what’s a working girl to do but grabs it by the balls. When I look at it this way, the movie feels more realistic in its treatment of the characters and the subsequent fallout more hilarious and ultimately revealing about human nature, not phony clichés about broken hearts.Â
Baker has been telling stories centred around sex workers in his movies, most notably in Tangerine, a strikingly bold piece of filmmaking that focuses on trans street walkers and shot on a bunch of iPhones back in 2015. Baker’s stories are interested in people often relegated to the lower reaches in society – the poor, the transient, the stigmatised and marginalised. Baker takes us into their private lives and shares their intimate details, finding humour, resilience and tenacity in how they tackle personal challenges. Ani is a fearless creation and as I mentioned earlier, not averse to turning up the level of emotional dial. Mikey Madison embodies the indomitable fighting spirit of her character in a ferocious performance, not only bearing her body but shielding her vulnerability behind a combative yet delicate exterior.
Ani is just one of the characters who evolve convincingly from who they initially appear, and that’s showing the strength of Baker’s screenwriting. The movie tests our first impressions of sex workers, Prince Charming, violent thugs and even a priest at the service of a powerful tycoon. Some of them turn out to be worse while others show a side of humanity you might not expect. Did anyone anticipate the stereotypical thug Igor, who subdues a defenceless woman by force, to dare suggest in front of his paymasters that their privileged heir apologise to a prostitute? These characters change before our eyes as Ani sees her fairy tale turn into a pile of dust, as she learns the hard way how far she’s capable of going to defend what she believes she’s rightfully earned. The characters may not be particularly likeable but they're a compelling bunch and their combustive collision makes Anora a riot of a movie.
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