Ani (Mikey Madison) works at The Headquarters in Manhattan, a large adult club with exotic dancers, private rooms, and huge bar tabs. Sean Baker follows Ani around what appears to be an average night for her; constant movement from one client to the next. A subtle or not so subtle hustle – a lap dance, a small flirtation, a vaguely sympathetic ear (whatever it takes). It’s a job and she’s good at it. Good enough that she seems to have developed an enemy in another of the workers, Diamond (Lindsey Normington). Mostly, however there is an easy flow between the dancers and hostesses. Ani and Lulu (Luna Sofía Miranda) talk about their bejewelled manicures (“Yours looks real classy, mine just has dollar signs like a real hoe.”), clients, and the bad DJ. Ani whose accent is about as broad Brooklyn as can be imagined, is part realist and part optimist, but all cash-up-front.
Into the club wanders a group of Little Odessa party kids led by Vanya Zakharov (Mark Eydelshteyn) the cashed-up scion of a Russian oligarch. Ani (full name Anora Mikheeva) is called out to be the party’s hostess because she understands Russian (although she doesn’t like to speak it). Vanya is charming in a chaotic manner and as the night progresses and Ani has paid some special attention to him in one of the private rooms, he asks if she can see her outside work. She gives him her number. Prince Sweet and Shambolic arrives in Ani’s life with his huge, gated mansion and seemingly unending bank account. At twenty-one Vanya is making the most of his time in America before he has to go back to Russia and start working with the family. He proposes Ani be exclusive with him for one week as his horny girlfriend, and for $15K she agrees.
Baker takes Ani on her whirlwind romance with a contemporary screwball comedy aesthetic. Cocaine, candy stores, private flights to Vegas. Ani’s “Cinder-fucking-ella” story takes her by surprise. Vanya, for all his immaturity, genuinely seems to like Ani, and is genuinely interested in her. He thinks she is miraculously beautiful, uncompromisingly sexy, and wants to wake up next to her. The Vegas vacation is perfect in its ‘unreal reality’ – a place where Vanya always has a penthouse suite. Where going all in takes on a new meaning when he proposes to her in part to ensure he doesn’t have to go back to Russia, and in part because they have so much fun together and surely, they can keep that fun going? Ani asks if he is really sure – because getting married still has some kind of meaning to her at least. If she says yes then she wants to be part of the family, to meet his parents, and have their ‘dreams come true.’ Through Drew Daniels’ hazy and magical camerawork creating a Las Vegas which is all neon lights and mirrors, the couple make a run for a wedding chapel and do the deed. Man(child) and wife.
It doesn’t take long before Vanya’s ‘fucked up parents’ hear rumours of the marriage and get on a plane to deal with the situation. But before that happens, they send Vanya’s American godfather, Toros (Karren Karagulian) and some hired help, the hopeless ‘muscle’ Garnick (Vache Tovmasyan) and the somewhat confused Igor (Yura Borisov) to force an annulment before they touch down. Vanya scarpers telling Ani to run with him, but she isn’t quick enough to get away before the trio invade the mansion and things begin to get out of control. Ani isn’t going down without a fight. Vanya is her legal husband and he’s old enough to make his own decisions she says. She’s scrappy enough to pack a major punch (to Igor’s surprise and admiration despite his being the face it lands on) and consistently does what she can to prove she’s not the cheap ‘gold-digging whore’ she’s presumed to be.
The magic of Anora is in how much attention Baker pays to Ani’s vulnerability and her anger at falling for a fairytale she should know better than to have considered. Ani and Lulu’s jokes about wanting to go to Disneyworld for their honeymoons and stay in the Princess suites seemed tinged with some level of understanding that the trip to Florida would be the highlight of their lives – that Disneyworld and all the manufactured happiness would be their princess moments. Ani never expected to have Coney Island become her own playground, or to move into a mansion where everything just appears stocked by a brigade of servants. She also didn’t expect that down the line she would become a slightly higher paid ‘servant’ after the terms of the contract had concluded. Once Ani wasn’t charging for her time and affection, she put herself at risk.
Ani is not ashamed of her job because the fantasy has set parameters. “What would your family think of you working here?” one of her clients asks during a lap dance. She quickly rejoins, “What would your family think of you coming here?” They laugh because both know where and who they are in the transaction. Vanya’s callowness is something Ani should have noted. Even in 25th hour when Galina Zakharova (Darya Ekamasova) and Nikolai Zakharov (Aleksey Serebryakov) are in America, even when Ani finds a barely conscious Vanya with her nemesis Diamond in a private room, even when she overhears the sheer wastefulness of her wastrel husband of a week or so, she tries to claw back her dignity from people who think she deserves none. It is only Igor who notices how much it is costing Ani on a fundamental level.
Mikey Madison is sublime as Anora; fierce, funny, feisty, and fragile in equal measures and often within the same scene. Ani is beyond a breakout role; it is a star-making turn where one can’t imagine anyone else but Madison donning the G-string or the glitter streaks in her long hair. Whenever Ani looks at someone and says, “Okay,” with her eyebrow slightly raised but with the willingness to go along with whatever nonsense they spout, Madison embodies the mix of experience, pragmatism, and sometimes self-deluding hope.
Sean Baker adores the honest liar or the hopeful and harmless fantasist. The immigrant selling knock off designer goods. The six-year-old creating her own rambunctious adventures in a fading Orlando motel. The huckster who will pass a three-dollar bill with a wink. He creates complete characters who go beyond simple stereotypes. In Red Rocket Simon Rex’s Mikey Saber is almost a character you can root for until you realise he’s a suitcase pimp seducing a seventeen-year-old. Sin-Dee Rella and Alexandra’s friendship in Tangerine is complicated by broken trust with the pimp Chester. Moonee’s mom, Halley, as much as she adores Moonee, isn’t going to be able to keep her daughter until she learns to stop brawling. Baker never simplifies his characters: they can be funny, tragic, awful, loving, kind, full of swagger, pissing in the wind, heartbreakingly earnest, lost, damaged, damaging – human.
It’s Baker’s own humanistic drive as a director which keeps him curious about the world and prevents him from writing simplistic moral tales. The fantasy escape at the end of The Florida Project for Moonee into Disneyworld is a child’s imagination finding a coping mechanism. Ani’s fantasy was that there was a way to sustain a fantasy, and in an ending that pushes against make-believe Baker locates Anora and gives her breath.
Anora is near timeless. Despite being set distinctly in the now it feels like a New York tale rising from the streets and building blocks of the New American Cinema. It also riffs on Capra, Wilder, Hawks, and Lubitsch. Anora soars as a transfixing work of art. The more time you spend with Mikey Madison’s bubble-gum blowing, wisecracking sex worker the more you adore her. Anora is impossible to resist.
Producers: Sean Baker, Alex Coco, Samantha Quan
Cinematography: Drew Daniels
Editing: Sean Baker
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