Sean Baker Goes Bigger and Smaller All at Once with Anora
When Ani (Mikey Madison), whose full name is the title of Sean Baker’s Anora, describes her whirlwind marriage to wealthy and (very) young man Vanya (Mark Eydelshteyn), she excitedly speculates on where they’ll go for a honeymoon. Maybe Disney World, she says, which has always been a dream of hers. (Brief shades, here, of Baker’s Disney-outskirts drama The Florida Project.) Maybe, she tells a fellow exotic dancer as she packs up her things and prepares to leave that life behind, they’ll get one of those princess-themed hotel rooms. She’s thinking, in particular, of Cinderella. Yes, she affirms: fuckin’ Cinderella.
One of the most fascinating aspects of Ani’s character is that her princess dreams don’t necessarily read as delusional. She understands that she met Vanya at the strip club; understands, intuitively, that the Long Island mansion he hires her to visit isn’t the product of his drug-dealing or gun-dealing, as he initially claims while barely keeping a straight face; and knows very well that the duo’s impulsive Las Vegas wedding is essentially their first non-paid date. Ani is too good at her job – and Baker is too savvy about the lives of sex workers – to be naïve about what constitutes true love. And yet: She has fun with Vanya. He throws money around like crazy. During a weeklong jaunt, for which she extracts $15,000 cash up front, they frolic and cavort with his friends in ways that are at once debauched and weirdly sweet. Maybe Ani agrees to his proposal because, in addition to the fun they’re having in the moment, she understands that the lack of a prenup might protect her later. Or maybe she believes she and Vanya can love the time they have together, even if head-over-heels romantic love after a couple of mostly-paid weeks seems unlikely. After all, Cinderella’s happiness may not hinge on whether she truly loves that prince.
This unconventional courtship takes up most of the first hour of Baker’s film, giddy with its own potential foolishness. Then, Vanya’s parents – Russian oligarchs, from the sound of it, though they could just as well be outright gangsters – hear the rumors of their son’s recent marriage, and send some guys out to fetch their wayward son. Another master stroke in Baker’s movie, which is as at least as much of a character study as his previous film Red Rocket, is how he draws Toros (Karren Karagulian) and his henchmen Garnick (Vache Tovmasyan) and Igor (Yura Borisov). They glower menacingly, to be sure. But they are people, too. Collecting Vanya, and ideally producing an annulment of his recent union, is a job – more thankless, in this telling, than Ani’s sex work.
By sheer volume of people screaming obscenities and insults at and past each other, Baker’s newest film harkens back to his breakthrough Tangerine, in which a trans sex worker recently released from jail embarks on a day-long journey to track down her cheating boyfriend (and also pimp). Anora runs nearly an hour longer, and is shot on 35mm film instead of an iPhone. It uses this extra time, and a gorgeously expanded frame, to live in its scenes a little longer, past some of the big laughs they contain. When confronted with Russian and Armenian muscle, Ani (who is herself of Russian descent, and can understand the language, though she prefers not to speak it) reacts with combative self-defense. She’s not willing to leave her marriage quietly, or possibly at all. But Madison’s performance is less shticky than it might seem from the Brooklyn accent and brassy attitude; notes of panic and hurt creep onto her face in between her passages of crowdpleasing bravado. And that face! Madison was so determinedly unhinged in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood and the fifth Scream (it felt appropriate that she was eventually set aflame in both); here, she looks perpetually in danger of igniting in pleasure at her own triumphs of inflamed male desire.
Eydelshteyn, meanwhile, is remarkable for how long he’s able to maintain some thin façade of boyish charm around Vanya, even though Ani should probably know better. From the moment he shows her around “his” mansion by skidding around the slick floors in his socks, he gives off kid vibes, undiminished after the two have married. The incessant rattle of a video game controller (and the rat-a-tat of the game’s gunfire) soundtracks their time snuggling on the couch, and she must gently coach him away from his otherwise unyielding jackhammer pace during sex.
It’s one of many moments that Anora could play for broad, dumb, sneering sex farce, and doesn’t. To be clear, there is some farce in the movie, which features a wild goose chase not unlike the one that fueled Tangerine. But Baker obviously loves most of his characters, and while Anora doesn’t necessarily give off warmth, spending so much of time in the visceral chill of a Coney Island winter, it regards the entire situation with nonjudgmental good humor and a touch of melancholy. More than ever, Baker likes to swing between bigger and smaller, with multi-location montages butting up against a lengthy sequence rooted so firmly in the mansion that you might wonder if the movie is going to stick it out there for the rest of the running time.
An area where Anora feels smaller, almost self-consciously so, is in its politics. Red Rocket casually took place during the 2016 election, adding a layer of commentary on the culture of fake-it-til-you-make-it shamelessness that enabled its porn-star huckster antihero; The Florida Project made great thematic hay of the way its economically disadvantaged characters lived in the shadow of a giant, plastic, American fantasy of prosperity. Neither movie shortchanged its characters for these connections. By comparison, Anora doesn’t feel quite so plugged into the current moment, beyond the vexing fact of Russian oligarchs treating New York City as their own personal playground. Instead, Baker keeps zeroing back in on his heroine. He doesn’t portray sex work as an inescapable hell, so there isn’t an immediately obvious desperation to Ani, yet the movie does chart a growing realization that she may have exceeded the limits to her own commodification, and that figuring out a next step will be scary. One thing Vanya isn’t, at the beginning of the movie, is scary. And if he still looks like trouble, who can blame Ani for taking the leap anyway? Cinderella didn’t know that prince too long, either.
Director: Sean Baker
Writer: Sean Baker
Starring: Mikey Madison, Mark Eydelshteyn, Vache Tovmasyan, Yura Borisov
Release date: October 18, 2024
Jesse Hassenger is associate movies editor at Paste. He also writes about movies and other pop-culture stuff for a bunch of outlets including A.V. Club, GQ, Decider, the Daily Beast, and SportsAlcohol.com, where offerings include an informal podcast. He also co-hosts the New Flesh, a podcast about horror movies, and wastes time on Twitter under the handle @rockmarooned.