The Brooklyn Project

My thoughts on Anora

Once upon a time, there was a movie named Pretty Woman that told the story of the romance that develops between an icy business tycoon and the world’s most wide-eyed and adorably innocent (she even flossed her teeth) prostitute after the former hires the latter to serve as his date for a week for the then-hefty sum of $3000. Trust me, the basic premise sounded kind of gross even back then (and was even weirder because it was produced by a division of Disney Studios) but thanks to the decision to remove any trace of the actual reality of such a potential situation from the narrative and the undeniably captivating performance from superstar-to-be Julia Roberts in the title role, moviegoers were more than willing to overlook that and transformed the film into a mammoth hit. Now, having made a string of films that have cast a realistic-yet-sympathetic look at the lives of sex workers and their struggles to survive on the fringes of society (Tangerine, The Florida Project, Red Rocket), filmmaker Sean Baker has, for his latest project, essentially taken the Pretty Woman template and reworked it to see how it might play out in something more closely resembling the real world. The result is Anora, a genuine knockout of a film that combines human drama with full-force farce in an audacious and always-fascinating manner and contains a central performance from Mikey Madison that is just as much of a galvanizing, star-making turn as the one Roberts herself delivered back in the day.

She plays Anora—though she prefers to go by Ani—and works as a pole dancer and escort at a Brooklyn club where she is clearly very good at her job, proving herself equally deft and luring guys into the back room for expensive lap dances and standing up to her boss, at one point demanding time off by pointing out that he can be more rigid with her hours once he starts giving her and the other dancers health insurance and a 401K for their troubles. One night at the club, she is asked to spend time with a new patron, a young guy named Ivan (Mark Eydelshteyn) because he primarily speaks Russian, a language that she has some understanding of thanks to her grandmother. The two of them hit it off spectacularly and Ani even agrees to meet him outside the club at his house, only to then discover that said house is actually a sprawling mansion and that Ivan, who appears to be the result of a secret project to clone Timothee Chalamet, is actually the son of a powerful Russian billionaire who is ostensibly in America for his studies. Before long, he hires her to essentially be his girlfriend for a week (for $15,000) and in the middle of it all, during a particularly hedonistic spur-of-the-moment trip to Vegas with some friends, he proposes marriage to her and, after giving it a little bit of thought, she accepts and the two are off to an all-night chapel to seal the deal.

This is more or less where the Pretty Woman angle ends and the real meat of the film begins as what looks like a happily-eve-after beyond Ani’s wildest dreams begins to curdle. No sooner has she left her job at the club and moved into Ivan’s mansion—where her time seems to be divided between having sex and watching him playing video games—that word of the marriage begins to get out. This is very bad news for Toros (Karen Karaguilan), an Armenian fixer who is being paid by Ivan’s parents to keep him out of trouble, especially the kind involving impromptu marriages to sex workers. With his two Russian goons, Garnick (Vache Tovmasyan) and Igor (Yuma Borisov), Toros frantically rushes out to confront Ivan and to take him and Ani out to get the marriage annulled before his parents arrive the next day. Proving that he is still little more than a spoiled and petulant child, Ivan responds to this by running away and leaving Ani behind to face the intruders on her own.

This leads to the spectacular comic highlight of the film, a glorious extended sequence in which Ani, who has managed to convince herself that her marriage is indeed solid, more or less  destroys a living room and inflicts considerable damage on Garnick and Igor as well in her efforts to get them to leave what she considers to be her house. After finally subduing her, Toros manages to explain that the house and everything else belongs entirely to Ivan’s father, that this is not the first time that he has been sent in to clean up one of Ivan’s messes and that the whole impetus of the marriage was almost certainly to gain him a green card. She eventually agrees to help the guys try to track down Ivan (for a $10,000 fee) and so they head off for a long night of searching his usual haunts in search of him. At first, Ani tries to use her perceived status as Ivan’s wife to suggest that she is somehow still in charge of what is going on but as the night drags on, it becomes apparent that she has more in common with her captors in that they have all put their lives aside to essentially serve as playthings to super-rich people who will betray or humiliate them in an instant, safe in the knowledge that their obscene wealth will protect them from any repercussions.

As giddily entertaining as the opening scenes charting the meeting and courtship of Ani and Ivan, it is in this middle section as Ani and the guys try to find the missing prodigal wastrel that Anora really catches fire. I have seen the film described in places as being a screwball comedy and while it does fall under those parameters, I suppose, it makes for a fairly unnerving variation of one—while the bickering between Ani and the guys is often hilarious, as is the various misadventures they encounter throughout the night, Baker at the same time manages to quietly but effectively turn up the tension so that we never forget the very serious trouble that they will all be in if they are unable to find Ivan in time. If you can picture what might have resulted if Blake Edwards, the master of creating cinematic chaos, had directed Elaine May’s script for Mikey and Nicky, her serio-comic tale involving mid-level hoods and a rambling all-night pursuit, it might look a lot like this. Juggling these two distinct tones would be a challenge for most filmmakers but Baker pulls it off with such astonishing ease and flair that even when the film becomes a little more conventional in the final section with the arrival of Ivan’s parents (Aleksey Serebryakov and Darya Ekamasova), the cinematic high that you get from what preceded it is so propulsive that keeps you going even through the last stretch.

Much of this is due to the amazing performance from Mikey Madison as Ani. Although you have probably seen her before—she turned up briefly as Manson family member Susan “Sadie” Atkins in Once Upon a Time. . .in Hollywood, was one of the killers in the terrible Scream reboot and played one of Pamela Adlon’s daughters on Better Things—her work is almost certainly going to launch her into star status. At first, you are knocked out by the sheer force of her personality but as the film goes on, you begin to click on to just how nuanced her performance truly is. When we first see her, she comes across as someone who is brash and bold and knows all the angles but during the heady early days of her courtship, as it were, with Ivan, you get the sense that she has actually managed to convince herself that the Pretty Woman fantasy that she is living could actually come true and, more significantly, that she genuinely has feelings for him that go beyond his riches. Although the character as written is not given the level of nuance that Baker has extended to some of the characters in his earlier films , she subtly weaves in more emotional underpinnings through her performance that allow us to continue to care for her throughout and which pay off in the unexpectedly powerful final moments. The result is one of the most indelible screen performances to turn up in a while and one worthy of all the hype that it has been generating of late.

Anora could have perhaps used a little bit of pruning here and there—though the same could be said for a number of Baker’s films—but even at its most frantic, it never begins to wear out its welcome. It is perhaps the most sheerly fun film to have won the Palme d’Or at Cannes to come along since Pulp Fiction and I can see it electrifying viewers in much the same way with its quirky characters and wild shifts in tone. Although the Cannes prize has firmly put it in the running for this year’s Oscar derby, I suspect it will be too crazy for those voters to fully embrace—watch for Madison to score tons of critics prizes, only to lose the big one to a far more conventional film and performance—but I also have a feeling that it will last longer in the mind that whatever does win. Simply put, Anora is a blast from start to finish—it is one of the funniest films of the year and ultimately one of the most moving as well.