The Brooklyn theatre in which I saw Anora, Sean Baker’s Palme D’Or-winning new feature, had programmed a series of trailers of other films about sex workers to precede it. It was a useful primer (or anti-primer) to be reminded of the cloying mechanics of Pretty Woman before being submerged in Baker’s world. Pretty Woman’s world is one where allusion to poverty is present only to highlight the fluff at its centre. In Anora, the lineaments of such a fairy tale are established only with the intent to swiftly disrupt them. What follows the fairy tale is undoubtedly more real – first chaos, and then the abrupt return to the reality of lives hemmed in by financial and social limitations – even if I slightly rued that we couldn’t go on living in the deranged high tempo of that exhilarating first third.
Baker has been a singular filmmaker for two decades now, often interested in marginalised lives, such as those of undocumented immigrants and sex workers.Tangerine (2015) was the first film of his I saw, which follows a transgender sex worker recently released from jail looking for her unfaithful boyfriend. It was celebrated for its distinctive technique and casting approach – filmed on iPhones and featuring many non-professional actors – but it was primarily a big-hearted and old-fashioned friendship movie. Anora, too, is surprisingly traditional in many ways, despite its straining against more hopeful Hollywood conventions – at times straining a little too hard.
Anora (Mikey Madison), or Ani, as she prefers to be called, is a 23-year-old dancer and sex worker from Brighton Beach, a neighbourhood of south Brooklyn near Coney Island which is mainly occupied by Russian and Eastern European communities. We meet Ani while she is hard at work: so much so that we barely absorb how exhausting her seemingly effortless charisma and flattery of her enraptured clientele must be, until we see her fast asleep – hood up and headphones on – on the train home the following dawn. One night Ani’s boss tells her he has a client who wants a girl who speaks Russian: Ani speaks a little, and understands more, because her grandmother never learned English.
She meets Ivan, or Vanya, who is 21, although he looks and acts like a teenager. He appears to be limitlessly wealthy, as well as on a lot of cocaine. Vanya is an absurd character, but thrums with an energy which is palpably infectious. Even his juvenile sexual inadequacy – thrashing and pumping with the relentless, brainless drive of a machine – is curiously touching. The two begin a whirlwind romance of sorts. She is well remunerated for the task of being his girlfriend for the week, and enamoured with the grotesque excess of his wealth, but at the same time we see what seems to be genuine affection sprouting beneath her practised charm. On a trip to Las Vegas, the two impulsively marry, with Vanya enthused by the idea of becoming an American and escaping the control of the oligarch parents who are bankrolling his lifestyle before he must return to the family company in Russia. When his handlers find out that he has married an American escort, hell breaks loose and Vanya flees, leaving Ani stuck with three men charged with securing his return and the annulment of the marriage.
What follows is broadly comic, but overshadowed by the discomfort of the viewer, who knows all too well what violence is usually meted out to beautiful young sex workers on-screen. For a good 30 minutes, Ani is confined to a living room with a hired heavy of deceptive gentleness named Igor, instructed by his bosses to keep her there. While he does everything in his power to get her to keep still without physically harming her, she understandably lashes out, landing a surprisingly solid punch, biting his neck, breaking the nose of another man. It’s funny and wild and chaotic, but it functions as more than just slapstick thanks to intolerable tension of we feel, wondering if and when they will seriously hurt her.
Many have described Anora as Mikey Madison’s breakout turn (though she was also unforgettable in the Pamela Adlon TV dramedy Better Things), and have specifically commented on the old-fashioned quality of her face. It is truly remarkable – Madison has those nauseatingly appealing starlet eyes which saturate the screen, laden with feeling – but she offers something more complicated than just the classic quiver of emotion. She embodies a confluence of savagery and seduction, her beauty not just pleasing but vengeful somehow, a touch mocking. As things unravel and Ani begins to fully understand that things will not be working out for her, that the unexpected windfall really was too good to be true, the rawness of Madison’s expression emerges more fully. She loses both Ani’s facade of sweetness, and the actual sweetness of a young woman managing to talk herself into a fantasy.
This was, for me, the most moving part of Anora, to witness the youthful ability to be so completely and incorrectly convinced of something. There is a scene in the immediate aftermath of their shotgun wedding in which Vanya and Ani, radiantly beautiful and glowing with booze and lust, dance on the strip under the monstrous, gaudy lights of Vegas. No part of the audience believes in the reality of their love, and yet it is nonetheless wonderful to see them fool themselves so ecstatically. It’s a skill we mostly lose in later adulthood.
In the ensuing aftermath, Baker insists on evading the more comforting or cliche choice at each turn, with almost grim determination. While there is something truthful about the depiction of how lives like Anora’s and Igor’s are set into motion by forces outside themselves, there is also something wearyingly fatalistic in the feeling, common through Baker’s oeuvre, that it is impossible to change one’s lot in life.
Content from our partners
Related
