Review: Anora

Director:  Sean Baker

Stars:  Mikey Madison, Karren Karagulian, Mark Eydelshteyn

Sean Baker knows a thing or two about a hustle. Not only is a lion’s share of the maverick filmmaker’s oeuvre preoccupied with the trials and tribulations of sex workers on the fringes of American society, but Baker came up the hard way, running and gunning it guerrilla style, scraping films together and shooting like the cops were on his tail. For the first 10 years of so of his professional career he had the feel of an underdog or outsider. It’s only been in the last decade or so – since the lurid zest of the iPhone-shot Tangerine flirted with mainstream attention – that he’s been accepted as one of the US’s most essential talents. The coup de grâce may well be winning the feted Palme d’Or this May for his latest, broadest work; Anora.

After the heat haze shimmers of Florida (The Florida Project) and Texas (Red Rocket), a New York winter brings with it an aesthetic cool down for Baker, but in all other respects he’s firing on the same cylinders. It’s somewhere between Christmas and New Year and Ani (Mikey Madison) is busy grinding the laps of customers at HQ, the club where she ekes out her living by night. It is in this capacity that she meets spend-happy Russian nepo-baby Ivan (Mark Eydelshteyn), a mostly-adorable rich kid with ties to a powerful overseas family who becomes enamored of Ani’s singular charms. She quickly becomes his personal escort, easily achieved when he shows no qualms throwing $15,000 her way for a week playing his horny girlfriend.

Their whirlwind adventure together ultimately leads to a blow-out in Vegas and a spur-of-the-moment marriage. On returning to New York, however, Ani discovers the honeymoon is quickly over when news of their nuptials draws the aghast attention of Ivan’s Armenian godfather Toros (Baker mainstay and secret weapon Karren Karagulian). His arrival at Ivan’s swanky playhouse with a couple of ineffectual heavies (Yuriy Borisov’s Igor and Vache Tovmasyan’s Garnick) changes the form and pace of Anora. The remainder of the film plays out like a splicing of After Hours with Baker’s own Tangerine – a 24 hour marathon farce that kicks off when Ivan gives everyone the slip.

The opening act of the film is a dazzling cloudburst of activity. The sex and drugs are plentiful and Baker catalogues Ivan’s privileged existence in such a way as to make its appeal to Ani clear and their disparate circles explicit. We don’t need an hour of context to understand her existence is paycheck to paycheck. That her body is her commodity in a gig economy and Ivan’s halcyon lifestyle offers the alluring semblance of solidarity and consistency. Ivan’s puppy-dog affection for Ani offers her a romantic fantasy, so its not hard to believe their impulsive trip down the aisle.

The introduction of Toros, Igor and Garnick allows Baker to play out some bravura comedic set pieces, and also affords Madison the opportunity to give Ani the grit and gusto of an industrious woman who’s had to dig her heels in before in this life. Madison proves herself a gifted comedic presence, and its easy to see how her memorable performance for Radio Silence in Scream (2022) caught Baker’s attention when he was looking for his perfect Ani. Baker’s mined this tonal territory before, and the middle of Anora feels like an attempt to one-up the manic crescendo that brought Red Rocket to a triumphant close.

This is only the middle of the picture, though. Ahead lies a slightly undisciplined crawl through a long New York night, one pocked with plenty of highlights, but which still comes to feel a shade overextended. Baker’s not done, either, as this odyssey stretches out further into the next day, obtaining something of a second wind once Ivan’s parents touch down to confront their wayward son. Anora is his longest picture to date, and it allows a little too much time to contrast and compare it to some of his snappier career highs.

The end, however, brought this viewer right back around, and it is here that the merits of supporting player Borisov demand closer inspection. Baker slowly increases our sympathies for hired-hand Igor, placing him in a context not too dissimilar to Ani’s own (often assumed) situation, bonding them together as kindred without realising it. For his part, Borisov undersells this evolution tremendously, until he’s suddenly the central figure in the film.

Surreptitiously – amid the swearing, slapstick, vomit and detritus of this journey – Baker presents Ani something genuinely dangerous; the threat of an actual, perilous human connection. The final scene of Anora takes many turns, and encourages a range of responses from an audience, but the final moments are among the best in all of Baker’s work, and help bolster the notion that this movie marks the culmination of a project 20 years in the making.

This might be the last time that Baker can play a number of these cards without seeming to have run low on ideas, however. Anora is a riotous remix of nearly everything the filmmaker has achieved up to this point, but for those seasoned in his filmography, the sense of familiar ground takes some of the sparkle away. The famous Jean Renoir quote goes “A director only makes one film in his life. Then he breaks it into pieces and makes it again.” This is starting to feel particularly true of Baker, whose almost-perfect career run feels displayed here in its entirety, albeit shuffled into a new maximalist configuration. Anora itself may be the true coup de grâce. The end of a significant chapter before, one hopes, something thrillingly new.