We have been led to believe that if a woman’s garments are turned into a gown, a pumpkin into a carriage, and her raggedy shoes into glass slippers, she may be seen as royalty. But at what point do preconceived notions vanquish superficial dressing? With “Anora,” writer and director Sean Baker returns to the world of sex workers to discover if coats of mink and sable are all it takes to change how we see a person.
Like his previous three features “Red Rocket,” “The Florida Project,” and “Tangerine,” Baker’s newest film follows a sex worker, the titular Anora, or “Ani” for short, played by Mikey Madison on an anxiety-inducing but riotous 24-hour journey through the luxury and degradation of Brighton Beach after she marries the son of a rich Russian oligarch (Mark Eidelstein), whose parents set out to do whatever it takes to have the marriage annulled.
The winner of the Palme d’Or at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, “Anora” is the kind of film that makes a director—and its lead performer, for that matter—untouchable, no matter who they are or when they made it. But it’s an especially impressive ascension to the big time for Baker, who, while critically beloved, has remained somewhat outside the mainstream with his low-budget neorealist dramedies about poor people on the margins.
For Baker, forever an architect of chaos as much as empathy, the film is simultaneously most emblematic of his ethos and also a more digestible departure from it. It is also likely to be the film that will define him given the film’s impressive opening in limited release and critical acclaim. The film has garnered lots of attention among college students specifically, with Neon, the studio distributing the movie, adding a second screening specifically for Emerson and Harvard students after their first special screening for the colleges sold out.
While financial information for the latest from the indie darling is hard to come by, just by looking at every perfectly composed frame of “Anora,” it rightfully oozes rich in all the best ways, which may come as a surprise to anyone familiar with his work. Baker is the same man who has been known to stretch $100,000 and made shooting on an iPhone one of the best artistic choices of the last decade.
The only thing that’s maybe more of a trademark to Sean Baker’s genre than sex workers is the working class generally. Bakers’ phantasmagorical direction and the cinematography of Drew Daniels for his previous film “Red Rocket” made for an aesthetic that highlights the beauty in unsavory environments. The pair team up again here, yet it was jarring to see that same lens turned on the already visually perfect environments of the uber-wealthy here. The result is a certain soullessness to the composition of the film, perhaps fitting for his first movie tackling the rich.
For what they lacked in technical specificity, Baker’s previous films were rich with color, physical heat, and the cultural fabric of their impoverished communities in Orlando, Texas City, and Los Angeles. Inextricable from the places they were set, Baker’s movies distinguished themselves with an emphasis on street casting and a ground-level guerrilla filmmaking approach.
By contrast, “Anora” exists in the downtown nightclubs and the gritty neighborhoods off the Coney Island boardwalk, but does not feel like a movie about New York so much as one happening there. The main cast are all also either established actors or regular Baker collaborators who he met on other projects.
Baker plunges us into a world of neon-colored nightclubs, sprawling Vegas hotel rooms, and a variety of illicit substances: the visually appealing but empty signifiers of luxury and excess rendered in truly beautiful anamorphic 35mm film. The neighborhood of Brighton Beach is in the midst of winter, lacking the bustle and energy of tourists that would typically surround the Coney Island setting. At one point, Ani walks past the cyclone roller coaster, now in hibernation with the absence of the rays of summer.
There is, however, a certain mercifulness in the hollowness and disconnection of the technical aspects of the film. It does allow for some level of reprieve from a plot that moves with the pace and energy only usually reserved for New York filmmakers, becoming a stressful whirlwind of f-bombs evocative of the Safdie Brothers’ New York odysseys, which Baker’s directing style increasingly resembles over the years—and which borders on pastiche here.
The script offers plenty of naturalistic dialogue that feels refreshingly contemporary. While the film’s onslaught of quickly hurled insults—and one hysterical hostage scene—creates a sense of urgency within the first hour, it noticeably shifts into a lower gear in the latter half. This rapid deceleration can seem jarring, as it first dances through its opening, sprints through its second act until the halfway point, before ultimately dragging its feet until the credits with most of the rest of its plot confined to the events of a single evening.
We spend the first hour in crowded nightclubs until the film pivots and essentially becomes a dysfunctional road trip movie. In some ways, the second half could be read as a consequence of the bombastic nature of the first, but that juxtaposition doesn’t make it any easier to digest. The lengthy scenes stuffed with dialogue cause the film to feel stagnant in the third act, before redeeming itself with an ending that’s sure to surprise.
In the transition here away from the underground to more established modes of storytelling, Baker displays perhaps his best and most underappreciated talent in knowing how to play the hits.
As literary theorist Christopher Booker astutely pointed out, there are only really seven story plots that get retold over and over again, and by god, if the tale of a sex worker becoming entangled in the life of a wealthy client doesn’t deserve to be one of them. “Anora” is hands down the best and funniest way that story has ever been rendered.
While critics have pigeonholed the film with comparisons “Pretty Woman” or other “hooker with a heart of gold” tales, it stands on its own as a film that isn’t just a perfectly hilarious genre concoction, but arguably the best commentary on the American Dream Baker has ever produced in his fifth time trying.
Baker is our greatest working humanist filmmaker, a man who has repeatedly displayed not just a commitment to telling stories but changing the actual narratives of society with his advocacy for the decriminalization of sex work.
Here he takes sex, money, love, and transactionality and turns them into the perfect conduits for understanding the human condition and humanizing his subjects at the same time—since its release, many sex workers have praised the film for its humanity and lack of cliches when depicting their profession.
Through the events of the narrative, Ani’s strong will and quickness to defend herself are eroded, allowing Madison to deliver an initially subtle turned heartbreakingly revealing performance—one can only hope that if anything, this film serves to transform her into a bonafide star.
The rest of the cast, which Baker made sure to pad out with non-actors and real-life sex workers in smaller roles, is also fantastic. Eidelstein, as Ani’s air-headed, client-turned husband, delivers a large portion of the film’s humor with his broken English, barely sober demeanor, and charming physical acting. His disgruntled caregiver Toros, played by Karren Karagulian, adheres to the amusing yet borderline mean-spirited nature of the film’s dialogue, spending the film offering plenty of his Armenian boomer sensibilities, chewing up every scene he’s present for.
As a comedy, “Anora” is very economical in giving its characters equal time to provide humor, but as a drama it is perhaps even more effective, finding a comedic timing but soulfulness that nails the kind of tone to leave audiences bouncing laughter off the walls in the film’s first act and walking out in stoned silence as the credits roll.
“Anora” tells the story of a woman who society thinks it can buy, finally discovering her worth.
Partway through the film, as Ani leaves her nightclub workplace for what she thinks will be the last time, she mentions the possibility of a Disney World honeymoon with Ivan. She tells her dancer co-worker of having always wanted to stay in a Cinderella-themed bedroom growing up. However, as the events of the film transpire, Ani’s childhood dreams of princes and palaces are hit with the cold, hard reality that at some point, carriages turn back into pumpkins and gowns return to being rags.
