Anora – Dir: Sean Baker (13th Floor Film Review)

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Sean Baker’s Anora, which won the Palme D’or at Cannes, the first American film to do so since Terrence Malick’s Tree of Life, may remind audiences of Pretty Woman. But it’s more subversive and explicit take on the subject of sex work.

Anora, a frenetic screwball comedy, is Baker’s fifth film about sex workers and his most accessible. Is it his best? Shot on-location with wildly entertaining plot-lines, star-making performances and euphoric needle drops, Anora is a fun-time, but it’s no Florida Project.

Mikey Madison, who was a Mansonite in Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood and a Woodsboro teenager in 20220’s Scream is the titular Anora. But the potty-mouthed Cinderella-like heroine, an exotic dancer who commutes from Brighton Beach to a popular Manhattan club, prefers to be called “Ani.” It’s here amongst contorting scantily clad bodies, pulsating flashes of light and the leering gaze of club patrons she meets “Vanya” Zakharov, the son of a Russian oligarch. He’s a gazillionaire.

The “Russian Timothée Chalamet”, Mark Eidelstein, is Vany. He’s in America to study, but prefers to party and play video games in his family’s  grand Brooklyn mansion. Anora understands Russian, but claims to not speak it. “My Russian is terrible. I can’t even roll my R’s.” she says. Anora is more than culpable at speaking the language. She learnt it from her immigrant grandmother in Brighton Beach.

Vanya takes a shine to Anora, paying for sexual services and inviting her to a wild party at his mansion. She’s wooed by his vivacity and money, of course. Vanya wants to be exclusive. “15, cash, upfront.” she replies. There’s a whirlwind of sex, fireworks, drugs and dancing, before the couple jaunt to Las Vegas. Naturally, they fly private.

Cinderella and her Prince Charming elope to a wedding chapel on the neon-soaked strip to consummate their love…and so he can get a green card to avoid returning to Russia. Their marital bliss doesn’t last long. The old adage, ‘What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas’ doesn’t ring true. World quickly spreads of their marriage and a trio of not-so-hench henchmen are sent by Vanya’s disapproving parents to track-down the couple and annul their marriage.

What’s odd about Anora is that although the camera captures lingers close to characters and their bodies in the most intimate of moments, the film feels flat and synthetic. Madison as Anora is a revelation, carrying much of the emotional weight of the film on her back, but the film doesn’t let you peek behind the boisterous Brooklyn veneer. She’s a character with her own wants, needs and desires, yet Anora is often just a springboard for the film’s internal logic and its desire for tragicomedy. Perhaps the superficiality of Anora is the point as she’s only a canvas for Vanya and his fantasies as is the transactional nature of sex work.

Baker instead chooses to keep the audience at arm’s length, rarely giving them an opportunity to understand the inner-workings of Anora’s characters. This observational approach to storytelling worked in the Florida Project where through a child’s-eye we saw the magic and misery of a budget motel near Walt Disney World. Anora however, is not a slice-of-life film. It mirrors classics like The Shop Around the Corner or His Girl Friday. Because of Baker and his lack of curiosity for anything beyond the observational in Anora, its punch to the solar plexus in the final act feels exploitative and shallow. It’s still affecting, but underbaked. As is the whole film.

Thomas Giblin

Anora is in New Zealand cinemas from today. Click here for tickets and showtimes

Thomas Giblin
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