'Anora' Is a Wildly Entertaining Home Run
Revisiting Stephen David Miller's thoughts on Sean Baker's soon-to-be-classic.
Today we’re re-running an edited version of
’s Cannes review of Sean Baker’s Anora, which goes into wide release this weekend. If you enjoy the review, check out Stephen’s podcast, The Spoiler Warning. -DavidSean Baker is one of my favorite contemporary American filmmakers. If you aren’t already familiar with his work, I highly recommend you take the plunge. He’s the poet laureate of the hustler class, the champion of people abandoned by society who are doing their damndest to survive. With each of his films, he holds a magnifying glass to the sort of character rarely given the big-screen treatment, finding beauty in both their perseverance and their (often sizable) flaws. Frequently working with first-time actors, Baker puts a premium on authenticity, and it shows. His breakout, Tangerine, was a holiday buddy comedy about two trans sex workers, shot exclusively on iPhones in the streets of LA. With The Florida Project, he shined a light on the precariously-housed of America. The slice-of-life drama centered around a single mother and her six-year-old daughter living in a budget motel somewhere in the shadow of Disney World. Red Rocket saw Baker deviating from his naturalistic approach, blowing up his narrative to match the heightened reality of his protagonist: a washed-up porn star (Simon Rex) with a delusion of grandeur so potent it distorts everything he touches.
Anora continues Baker’s trend of scaling things up, and I loved every minute of it. This is a propulsive, crowd-pleasing rollercoaster of an experience. It’s one of my favorite films to premiere at Cannes this year.
The titular Anora (Mikey Madison) is an exotic dancer and part-time escort working at a strip club in New York—and please, she insists you call her “Ani.” Ani has a job to do, and she’s very, very good at it: sparkling, self-possessed, and quick on her feet, she susses out her clients the instant she meets them and knows precisely how to make them feel at home. She also happens to be fluent in Russian, making her the perfect choice to entertain a new VIP named Ivan (Mark Eidelstein). Ivan, or “Vanya” as he’s colloquially known, is a high-roller. The 21-year-old son of a powerful Russian oligarch, he idles away the day in his Brighton Beach mansion like a horny, college-aged Richie Rich: throwing booze-heavy parties, playing first-person shooters on the couch, and having copious sex at jackrabbit speeds which he’s happy to pay for in cash. He’s enchanted by Ani from the very first dance, and responds to her friendly working demeanor like a kid in a Nickelodeon Super Toy Run. He’s giddy; he wants it all. It doesn’t take long for their arrangement to balloon from a private room at the club, to a night together at his house, to a weeklong, all-inclusive girlfriend experience culminating in an impromptu trip to Vegas. When they return to New York a day or two later, it is no longer as a client and an escort, but as husband and wife—much to the chagrin of Vanya’s parents.
In many ways this is familiar territory for Sean Baker, chronicling a few days in the life of a protagonist who would hardly be a side character in mainstream cinema. But typically there’s been some level of abrasiveness to his characters; in the case of Red Rocket, he is arguably a monster. Whereas Ani is a total joy to root for from beginning to end. Even when she’s wrong, she wins us over. Despite every rational instinct in me screaming that her whirlwind romance was doomed, I was as charmed by it as I would be any wholesome romcom classic. And when outside forces threaten her fairytale love story, I perceived it the same way Ani would. A crisis manufactured by joyless parents who don’t understand matters of the heart, like a threat to something beautiful that needs to be extinguished. I felt optimistic because she was optimistic.
That infectious optimism makes this Baker’s most accessible film by miles. I realize that “accessible” probably sounds like a surprising descriptor for an intensely R-rated story about a sex worker who wants to stay married to a frivolous playboy, but it’s true: The energy in my screening was electric. I haven’t heard an audience react so enthusiastically to anything else in competition this year. There were howls of laughter, impromptu rounds of applause, and moments of stunned silence precisely when the film demanded it. Like Ani to her clients, Baker had us eating out of the palm of his hand.
Much of this is due to the wonderful cast. Eidelstein is delightfully awkward in his portrayal of Vanya, a selfish-but-mostly-harmless party animal who has never seen anything he couldn’t own. He captures a very specific brand of stunted adolescence, which can either make him cute as a puppy or profoundly infuriating depending on our (which is to say, Ani’s) mood. We’re also introduced to a motley crew of Ivan’s babysitters/handlers, who grow increasingly desperate as his parents tighten their grip: Karren Karagulian as the family friend entrusted with their sweet little man-child, Yuriy Borisov and Vache Tovmasyan as his ill-equipped henchmen. They bring a perfect combination of intensity and lightness to the proceedings, sending the narrative into crime comedy-drama territory which feels equal parts the Coens and the Safdies.
Ultimately, though, the film belongs to Madison. She so effortlessly inhabits the character of Anora you’d think Sean Baker had met her at the altar of a Vegas chapel, bribed her client to hold off on the engagement, and convinced her to star in his next movie. She’s phenomenal, capable of carrying virtually every frame of Anora with aplomb, or selling even the most problematic dialogue like it were Shakespeare. It’s a dazzling performance, and it’s vital for the tightrope Baker’s script is walking.
What Vanya is offering to Ani is the hope of a better life. A life where she no longer needs to tailor her behavior to accommodate the whims of high-rolling assholes, but rather to live in their social strata, to be respected on her terms. This dream is so palpable, I frequently found myself on the verge of tears when nothing much was happening on screen: a silly party montage, say, or a trip on a private jet. It felt emotional, because it meant something to her. When the cracks in her dream start to reveal themselves, Ani fights with an intensity that has less to do with love than it does with self-preservation—and I wound up fighting alongside her. On one occasion, Baker pulls back the curtain and lets all this subtext become text. It’s a grace note that I’m still reeling from, a full day later.
Anora is the whole package. It’s wildly entertaining, laugh-out-loud funny, thought-provoking, challenging, and emotionally astute. I adored it. I do hope you make a point of seeking it out, and that you fall in love as much as I have. -Stephen David Miller
Stuff David Chen Has Made
I’m doing a new video series where I’m recording my thoughts on a film I’ve just seen while walking from the movie theater to my car. It’s a way to force me to try to articulate some interesting thoughts on a film in a very compressed timeframe. Check out my first ones below about Anora and Here. You can subscribe to my YouTube to get these moving forward.
On Decoding TV, we covered the season finale of Agatha All Along, which might end up being the best Marvel TV show to date(?!)
On The Filmcast, we reviewed Venom: The Last Dance. Let’s just say the movie did not live up to its potential.
[PAID ONLY] On my personal Patreon, we recorded the final pre-election episode in our Wisconsin series about what it’s like being an on-the-ground canvasser for Kamala Harris. Thanks to everyone who’s been with us for this journey. Listen to the episode here.