Few contemporary filmmakers conjure up the detail and incidental humour in the lives of the American underclass as well as Sean Baker. Not only does the director of The Florida Project and Red Rocket have an eye for location – be it the shady corners of downtown LA or the exurban sprawl of blue-collar Texas – but also for casting. In Anora, his Cannes top prize winner, he puts the perfect person in the perfect role: Mikey Madison gives a sparky, vulnerable, devastatingly real breakout performance as a strip-club dancer and sometime-sex-worker. Filmed with neon-lit nocturnal verve, Anora is as gorgeous to behold as it is deranged.
A whirling dervish in stripper shoes and hair glitter, Anora (Madison) – or Ani, as she insists on being called – is just another early-twenties girl working at a Brighton Beach strip club in New York City, with a talent for befriending her wayward male clientele and finagling them into private dances. The pier-side Brooklyn neighbourhood is populated by Russians and Eastern Europeans, and when Ani meets the son of a Russian oligarch, Ivan (Mark Edelstein, giving a hilarious and utterly believable performance as a kind of arrogant, cut-rate Timothée Chalamet), she sees dollar signs.
An unpredictable and often hilarious rags-to-riches tale gone cockeyed, the story moves from a glitzy, cocaine-fuelled Cinderella story into a nightmarish, high-tension odyssey through the city. Ani is thrilled when he pays her to be his “girlfriend” for the week – but then their careless hedonism leads them into infatuated romance, his eagerness to put a ring on her finger melting away her cynicism.
After an impulsive wedding in Vegas, Ani soon discovers the immense displeasure of Ivan’s billionaire parents at his marriage to a “hooker”. When their stateside watch-dogs – the dyspeptic, amusingly ineffective Toros (Karren Karagulian) and his tough but reluctant heavy Igor (Yura Borisov) – are sent to Ivan and Ani’s palatial residence, Ivan does what any self-respecting coward would do: he legs it, leaving his new wife to face the consequences.
Baker perfectly calibrates the fine line between danger and knockabout, near-slapstick comedy: we’re never quite sure how safe Ani is, and, it seems, nor is she, kicking, swearing, and biting in such an outrageous, endless stream that the exhausted men sent to handle her emerge cartoonishly bruised and limping.
But the film also speaks to heavier themes: a disrespected sex worker allows for questions about who in society has power, and why. In the exhilarating, sexy first half of the movie, it might seem that a young woman’s sexual power gives her a fast-pass through life’s hardships. But we and Ani soon learn that the masculine realms of money and influence always triumph in the long run.
With a conclusion that leaves the audience as broken and wrung out as Ani, who pointedly swaps her stilettos for a pair of Ugg boots in the closing scenes, Anora has a sting in its tail. For all its volatility and rage, its stripper catfights and clicking acrylic fingernails, at its heart this is a film about the transactional relationships between men and women – and rich and poor – and how deleterious that capitalistic spirit can be on the human soul.