The praise for Sean Baker’s Anora has come fast and furious and from all corners of the marketplace, from critics and punters alike. However, the widespread appeal of the Cannes Palme d’Or winner doesn’t mean you should expect this story of a rich man and a female sex worker to be a Pretty Woman-style romantic fantasy with a happy ending. That’s not what we’ve come to expect from Baker, who has had sex workers in every feature film he’s made, and a conventional happy ending in nary a one of them. If Anora is more accessible than those others, it’s primarily because of enough lightness in its approach to have been categorised as a comedy for the purposes of the recent Golden Globe nominations, though that is decidedly not the note on which the film leaves us.
The title character actually goes by Ani, though there’s no elaboration here on her clear aversion to her full name. In fact, there’s something generally impenetrable to the character played by Mikey Madison, who works at a New York strip club and has a vague desire to move on from that station in her life, though not for any reasons the film ever explores. At age 23, she may be closer to the beginning of this career than its end, but one client in the champagne room may be in the position to significantly curtail the duration of that career.
On this particular night Ani meets Ivan (Mark Eydelshteyn), who goes by the nickname Vanya, and who might be just like any other client of her establishment except for his Russian accent and limited English. In fact, Ani was specifically requested for her own limited abilities in Russian, which she mostly refuses to speak, though she can understand anything he says while speaking his native tongue. When they generally hit it off, he asks if she does any work outside of the club, code for whether she’ll work as a private escort for a higher hourly fee and a lot more services. She slips him her number, and it isn’t long before he’s offered her $15,000 to be his girlfriend for the next week, and shown her his palatial mansion (complete with its own lift) on the waterfront.
It turns out this is Vanya’s last week in America, and he’s got quite the impressive family he’s not ready to return home to. We don’t know exactly what Vanya’s father does, we just know Ani is very impressed when he tells her to google his father’s name. When both Vanya and Ani come to grips with the realisation that this week of hard partying with his mates, which includes a trip to Las Vegas, is finite, he decides to propose to her. She thinks he’s joking, but he isn’t – although it’s a way to keep him in the country, the unspoken part is that it’s a way for her to never have to work again. And though there might be something mercenary about the arrangement on both their behalves, they soon find themselves in a Vegas wedding chapel, convincing themselves they’re really in love – or as much in love as either needs to be for what they’re getting out of the deal.
Of course, the impressive family back home is none too happy about their son “marrying a prostitute” when they get wind of it, and before long, Vanya’s father has sent a trio of what Vanya calls his “monkeys” — first Garnick (Vache Tovmasyan) and Igor (Yura Borisov), followed shortly by their boss, Toros (Karren Karagulian from Baker’s Tangerine) – to essentially apprehend the pair for an immediate annulment. That endeavour does not go to plan.
For a story with a relatively simple scope, Anora goes on for a lot longer than you might expect, a full 2 hours and 20 minutes. This is mostly a good thing, as it gives Baker a chance to burrow down into the logistics of a wild night involving the five principal players already mentioned, with the arrival of Vanya’s parents looming in the form of a plane on its way from Russia. There is almost no doubt that the nature of Vanya’s family’s wealth is criminal, but the “goons” that are after Vanya and Ani – and Baker’s trademark humanism proves that to be an uncharitable description of them indeed – do everything they can to avoid treating the newlyweds criminally. In fact, much of the film’s significant humour involves them needing to detain the pair without resorting to force – not only because he’s the son of their boss, but because they are basically good guys in an industry that requires them sometimes not to be. Generally speaking, Baker takes no potshots at his Russians at a time when there might be political reasons to do so, which is also not what Baker is about.
If this review has gotten to the goons before it has even said very much about the two central characters, that gives something of an impression of the arm’s length at which Baker keeps these characters. Ani is not exactly thinly drawn, but we don’t know anything about her family and only a little bit about a few co-workers who are close enough to be considered friends. We don’t know what she wishes she were doing instead of this. Vanya is even a bit more of a cypher, a vapid 21st cetury version of a rich kid who has some charm and good qualities but has more dominantly been ruined by privilege. He’s a guy who has “some great ideas for apps” but doesn’t feel too guilty about his parents’ wealth affording his lifestyle. Then again, he’s also only 21.
Anora gets to some thoughtful ideas about all its characters without you really being able to trace how it got there. Baker’s movies don’t exactly have discernible themes, though the fact that each one has included a person who makes money through sexual favours – even if that is only a minor element of The Florida Project – indicates the recurrent sympathy he has for people at the lowest rungs of society and what they must do to survive. Although Ani has the brassy New York personality to refuse to take shit from anyone, least of all the tentacles of the Russian oligarchy, it becomes clear that she’s also quite damaged. The things we don’t know about Ani’s past or even her present clearly haunt these proceedings. It’s a take-notice performance from Madison.
If we can summarise the Baker aesthetic in any way, it may be that he has an insatiable thirst for profiling these people who have these jobs – who have to have these jobs – and how hope enters their lives and then flickers away again. He never deludes himself that the hope is more than ephemeral. The lack of a more firm perspective on the characters and an optimism about their futures may limit his appeal with some audiences, but then again, maybe the open arms extended to Anora indicate that we are all moving to Baker’s wavelength, rather than he moving to ours.
Anora is currently playing in cinemas.