***½/****
starring Mikey Madison, Yura Borisov, Ivy Wolk, Karren Karagulian
written and directed by Sean Baker
By Angelo Muredda Early in the second act of Sean Baker’s Palme d’Or-winning Anora, Toros (Baker staple Karren Karagulian), a rumpled Armenian fixer arriving on the scene of what ought to be a straightforward extraction job, notices the broken glass and smashed furnishings before him, and asks what happened. Baker’s camera follows Toros’s perspective as he takes in the fruits of the expertly crafted, lengthy screwball set-piece preceding his arrival, with the grim visual punchline of a young woman bound with a phone wire, gagged with a scarf, and propped up on one of his colleagues’ laps. The joke, at the expense of his ignorance and our knowledge of eponymous heroine Ani (Mikey Madison), the bound woman, is that the bulk of the damage hasn’t been done by his meathead colleagues but by her, in a feral act of self-defense that falls somewhere between the survival tactics of Road Runner and Kevin McAllister.
The suggestion that Anora (Ani’s unloved and unused Uzbek birth name) herself is what happened is a cocky one on Baker’s part, putting his protagonist in the pantheon of tough dames in the Barbara Stanwyck and Carole Lombard tradition. It’s to his and Madison’s credit that this mid-film hype routine doesn’t feel like too much of a stretch. Wiry and scrappy in her previous roles in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, as a wild-eyed Manson girl, and Scream (2022), as an extremely online cinephile killer, Madison gets to flex a little as the gregarious and charming sex worker, a consummate professional who’s abruptly fast-tracked into early retirement at 25 when her client becomes her meal ticket.
The only exotic dancer at her club who can understand and sort of speak Russian, Ani becomes an escort and personal favourite to billionaire Russian oligarch scion Vanya (known on his parents’ Wikipedia page as Ivan), played by newcomer and classic weird Baker find Mark Eydelshteyn, a rubber-limbed, fresh-faced ragamuffin who flails around like Jim Carrey but physically resembles a young Jean-Paul Belmondo. Enjoying his time with her, divided between the master bedroom where they have vigorous (and quick) sex, the sofa where he distractedly plays PS5 while she dances for him, and an assortment of high-end New York and Las Vegas clubs where he exposes her to the good life, and dreading his fated return to Russia for management training in his father’s company, Vanya proposes they get married in a mutually beneficial green-card situation. Assured that he’s serious, comfortable and maybe even happy in his presence, and wise to the financial prospects it might bring, Ani accepts, though their honeymoon is cut short when Toros and his hapless associates, the oafish but philosophical Garnick (Vache Tovmasyan) and the sensitive gentleman thug Igor (Yura Borisov), are sent by Vanya’s parents to annul the marriage before they arrive the next day to haul him back to Russia like a wayward puppy.
The film is structured in a series of movements that swerve from the observational tour of Ani’s club to the shenanigans in the mansion to the picaresque nocturnal quest to find Vanya. The prologue immerses us in Ani’s work life, where we witness her impressive performances, both physical and parasocial, as she makes clients feel at home and in good hands in her booth. This chapter is bookended by the obnoxiously sunny remix of Take That‘s earworm “Greatest Day,” the aspirational lyrics about staying close to your partner on the verge of something good happening punctuating Ani’s potential social ascendance through Vanya, who’s simultaneously her star client, dirtbag buddy, and husband. From there, Baker parks us in Vanya’s swanky, gated, multi-level home away from home, where the goon squad arrives to pressure Vanya to terminate the marriage, only for him to flee on sight and for them to become subject to comically escalating violence from Ani, who has presumably faced her share of menacing men before. Reading the writing on the wall and promised a $10,000 severance package, Ani then becomes Toros and the gang’s resigned accomplice and nocturnal guide through her and Vanya’s haunts in order to capture him before his parents drop in by private jet to close the matter and leave her a distant memory.
For all his apparent libertarian leanings online, Baker continues to be a friend to the worker behind the camera. Ani’s retail skill is depicted as both under-compensated emotional labour and a canny form of intelligence, which is completely lacking in Vanya, a likeable but volatile kid who’s always had his every need furnished for him before he can even articulate it and never had to think of others. Karagulian, so good as a beleaguered taxi driver managing challenging clients himself in Baker’s Tangerine, is even better here, channelling the put-upon middle-manager competence of Robert De Niro in Goodfellas. Existentially tired and desperate to get to his destination without having to look for parking, Toros is always putting out an annoying kid’s fires while serving his bosses’ whims, his thankless shit-shovelling work ultimately not all that different from Ani’s–which is not lost on her the more she realizes the kind of situation she’s married into.
At home in propulsive, shaggy-dog narratives set in unsavoury spaces, Baker does some tricky balancing of tone even by his standards in Anora, transitioning from the bacchanalian party montages of the first act to the technically impressive physical comedy in the mansion to the realist decompression of the epilogue, which finds Ani and Igor thrust into each other’s company after the fallout from locating Vanya. It’s here where Ani’s somewhat wispy characterization outside of her work tests the limits of Baker’s project. Who is Ani–or Anora, as Igor prefers to call her, citing the name’s meaning of light and bright (per his Google search)–and what does having her dream of wealth and comfort free of hustle snatched away from her at the last second mean to her? As a whirlwind of a screwball protagonist, she’s a loveable companion. As a professional putting in the hours and doing body-work in a Dardennes-like realist portrait of the ins and outs of sex work, she’s a compelling study. But it’s not so clear what coming close to the Big Time and crashing back down to earth means to her because we don’t know where she’s landing, outside of a name (and an ethnicity) she’s discarded and a small apartment with a roommate who scolds her for not getting milk.
What is clear, and what Baker is so good at capturing as a result of his evident respect for the work of sex workers (to whom he devoted his win at Cannes), is that it’s existentially rattling for Ani to have found her personal life extracted from her job and demeaned in the process–and to have been treated like an idiot, which Vanya calls her in a moment that instantly turns him back from missing Prince Charming to exploitative john. Whatever Ani is at home, she’s not a fool, and her realization that she’s been taken for a ride, right next to Igor, grants real emotional heft to the closing moments, where these two exploited workers who’ve had their tickets to a better life invalidated by their unfeeling social betters tentatively circle each other and connect. Programme: Special Presentations
