“Anora,” written and directed by Sean Baker, is a startlingly empathetic film about an exotic dancer in a New York “gentlemen’s club.” The reason it’s startling is that we’re used to seeing sexually explicit material like this sensationalized onscreen. But Baker is a humanist – there is nothing exploitative about what he does here. He’s after deeper emotional truths. Perhaps this is why “Anora” has been internationally acclaimed. It won the Palme d’Or at Cannes, that festival’s highest honor, and rightly so.
When we first encounter Anora (Mikey Madison), or Ani, as she wants to be called, she is plying her trade while also keeping a sharp eye on the men’s wallets and the clock. Because she speaks Russian – courtesy of her grandmother, who never learned English – she is put together with a new club member, Ivan (Mark Eydelshteyn), a goofball 21-year-old who, she finds out, is the son of a billionaire Russian oligarch. “You work in a cool place,” he tells her. Soon, as his private dancer, she is working in an even cooler place – the oceanside manse he alone occupies while his parents are in Russia.
A spoiled scamp, Ivan seems younger than 21 and barely speaks English. When he asks Ani her age, she tells him, probably truthfully, that she’s 23. He half-seriously replies, “You act like you’re 25.”
Why We Wrote This
People who live on society’s margins aren’t always treated with compassion and sympathy. But the director of “Anora” offers both. “I’ve rarely encountered a scene that moved me as completely and complicatedly as this film’s final moments,” says the Monitor’s critic.
Ani tells Ivan he is funny – as in, ha-ha funny – and we sense that, unlike most of the blandishments she hands out to customers, this is a compliment she means. Despite her street smarts, she’s both flummoxed and flattered by this guy. When he impulsively asks her to marry him, she accepts the offer, warily at first, and then wholeheartedly.
It’s a madcap Cinderella fantasy that, of course, is bound to collapse when Ivan’s parents find out. Enraged and en route to New York, they assign a pair of trusted local fixers, the Armenian Toros (Karren Karagulian) and his burly comrade-in-arms Garnick (Vache Tovmasyan), along with Igor (Yura Borisov), a thuggish-looking Russian, to annul the marriage.
Not so easy. Screaming at the top of her lungs and biting her captors, Ani insists she is Ivan’s rightful wife. Ivan, meanwhile, without Ani, has fled the scene. Much of the remainder of the film – which also deftly paints a fully lived-in portrait of the Brighton Beach Russian community – is about how this gaggle of misfits track him down.
“Anora” seamlessly interweaves a full range of tones, from the comic to the tragicomic. The entire cast is altogether extraordinary. Much of the film, especially once the fixers arrive, plays almost like slapstick. And yet, even at its giddiest, which also includes a jaunt to a quickie wedding chapel in Las Vegas, Baker never once loses sight of the humanity of these people.
This sensibility has always been a hallmark of Baker’s films, most notably “The Florida Project,” which told the story of children living in a rundown motel in the shadow of Walt Disney World. He has a feeling for lives lived on the margins, and what one must do to survive. Ani is such a powerful creation because Baker and Madison, without stooping to sentimentality, understand the character’s pathos: Given a glimpse of a glittering new life, she desperately wants to save it. She is not being mercenary, not anymore. She genuinely wants to be happy. She wants to be a wife. It is her pride.
The irony of “Anora” is that Ani is seeking normalcy in a world ill-fitted to meet her desires. When the fixers, and then Ivan’s parents, call her out as a prostitute, she explodes. She feels betrayed because that is not how she sees herself. We don’t see her that way, either.
And neither, it turns out, does Igor, who, with his bald pate and hoodie, appears so quietly menacing. Like everybody else in “Anora,” he is not what we initially take him to be. This refusal to stigmatize characters is the hallmark of Baker’s art. The scenes between Ani and Igor, which develop from contempt on her part to something far more emotionally layered, are the compassionate core of this film. I’ve rarely encountered a scene that moved me as completely and complicatedly as this film’s final moments. Baker isn’t merely demonstrating a sympathy for these people. He is expressing a profound sympathy for the bewildering convolutions of the human condition.
Peter Rainer is the Monitor’s film critic. “Anora” is rated R for strong sexual content throughout, graphic nudity, pervasive language, and drug use. It is in English, Russian, and Armenian, with English subtitles.
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