Who is Anora, and what does she want? It’s a question I found repeatedly popping up in the back of my mind as I watched writer and director Sean Baker’s film, the title of which shares his protagonist’s name but not much interest in answering those queries. There are a few points I can confirm. Anora, who goes by Ani (and is played by the riveting Mikey Madison), works as a stripper and escort at a Manhattan gentleman’s club, where she spends her nights selling a fantasy to men who are willing to drop significant amounts of money for a little pleasure and attention from a pretty young woman. When we first meet her, she’s in the middle of her shift; she circles the club, cozies up to eligible-looking men, makes sweet conversation, and brings them back to a private room for a lap dance. Rinse and repeat. Her clients are all older men with cash to spare, so when her boss interrupts her dinner break to pull her over to a man who’s actually younger than her and requesting a girl who can speak Russian (which Ani knows bits and pieces of from her grandmother, who she later says never learned English), her reluctance is understandable. Still, she appears charmed by him despite his immaturity (it doesn’t hurt that he clearly has the money to spend on her either), and the night ends with her putting her number into his phone, the prospect of seeing him again soon imminent.
But does Ani genuinely click with Ivan (Mark Eydelshteyn), who goes by Vanya, or is her flirtatiousness just part of the persona she dons at work? That’s one of the big hang-ups I have with Anora, despite its surface-level pleasures. When Ani returns home to the shitty Brooklyn apartment she shares with her sister, the train rumbling just outside her window, it’s clear that the fairytale is broken. Ivan invites her later that day to his sprawling mansion on the bay, and she jumps at the chance, but there’s always a clear understanding that this relationship, despite whatever fun they appear to be having with each other, is transactional. Ivan, as it turns out, is the son of a powerful Russian oligarch temporarily in America presumably to study, but instead spending his time— and his parents’ money— on parties, drugs, alcohol, and sex. He’s about the closest thing to a prince as could possibly walk into Ani’s club, so when he proposes that she be his girlfriend exclusively for a week, she agrees. And when, while on a raucous spur-of-the-moment trip to Vegas, he suddenly and nervously proposes marriage— partly so he won’t have to go back to Russia and work for his father, partly because he says he really loves her— the clearly skeptical Ani also agrees.
This whirlwind courtship— like something akin to, as Ani alludes to a friend following her Vegas elopement, a Disney Princess, like Cinderella— only consumes the first third of Anora. The start of Ivan and Ani’s marriage, like their relationship preceding it, appears to be one infinite honeymoon packed with sex and booze and drugs and pretty clothes and a huge rock for Ani’s finger. But news of the marriage makes its way back to Ivan’s parents, who send Ivan’s guardian Toros (Karren Karagulian) and his henchmen Garnick (Vache Tovmasyan) and Igor (Yura Borisov) out to track the couple down and have the marriage annulled. Suddenly, Ivan runs off, and Ani— who quit her job to devote herself to being his wife— has to contend with these strange men who forced themselves into their home, setting off a nightlong chase across Brighton Beach, Coney Island, and Manhattan searching for Ivan (all this location shooting, in addition to Drew Daniels’ 35 mm cinematography, grants the film a marvelously grounded sense of place).
It’s at this juncture following the fairytale romance that Anora dips its toes into classic screwball territory. Toros, Igor, and Garnick are a buffoonish trio rather than an especially threatening one, and their efforts to hold Ani and Ivan result in comic violence and literal pratfalls. It’s entertaining, if stretched to the point where the fun soon turns exhausting and repetitive. But the film also asks the audience at this point to believe that Ani truly loves Ivan, to the extent that she will fight tooth and nail— and turn down a lucrative monetary offer— to keep her husband. It’s a big ask, considering that Ani— 23 years old compared to Ivan’s 21, and obviously infinitely wiser about the world and more mature— mostly appears to react to his over-eager efforts at intercourse and intense focus on video games with a mixture of amusement and confusion. Baker has devoted much of his filmography, including his most well-known features— think Tangerine, The Florida Project, and his most recent film, Red Rocket— to destigmatizing sex work, and Anora is no exception. Baker opens his film with a pan across a row of topless women gyrating on top of their male clients, bathed in the club’s cool light, but he doesn’t gaze at them, or Ani, with an objectifying eye. It’s clear that this is simply just what they do to get by. But what precisely Baker is trying to say about the nature of transactional relationships between men and women with this film is unclear. It doesn’t help that there’s still a male gaze angle to this film, and so for the most part we don’t watch this story unfold from Ani’s perspective; in fact, we view much of her through Igor, a hired hand with little attachment other than Ivan’s family who appears amused and impressed by Ani’s spunk, and empathetic to her plight (and his character himself goes through a more fully-realized arc from enemy to friend). By the final scene, Baker gets to something about the inevitable disappointment that follows such relationships and the remorselessness of capitalistic societies, but it isn’t enough. In fact, it’s unsatisfying and even quite sad to see his formerly brassy heroine so broken. Baker is no stranger to melancholy material, and— in large part thanks to Madison’s performance, which fills in a few of the blanks on the page— Anora is at times one of his most vulnerable and compassionate films. I just wish that the woman at the center of the action didn’t feel like such a cypher.
Anora is now playing in theaters. Runtime: 139 minutes. Rated R.
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