“Sean Baker's Anora is an exuberant, heart-wrenching adrenaline rush.”
- Sean Baker's empathetic, breathless filmmaking
- Mikey Madison's moving, star-making lead performance
- An all-time ending that will stick with you for days
Anora is not a fairy tale, though it has all the potential to be one. Around its midpoint, the film’s title character wonders aloud if she’ll finally get to fulfill her lifelong fantasy of staying in the Cinderella Suite at Disney World for her honeymoon. In a different filmmaker’s hands, it’d be a fitting way for the new dramedy to end. Anora (Mikey Madison) — or Ani, as she prefers — may not be a girl wasting away cleaning her evil stepmother and stepsisters’ house, but as a stripper who still lives near New York’s Brighton Beach with her sister, she does fit a kind of modern Cinderella archetype. In Ivan (Mark Eydelshteyn), the gangly, rich son of a Russian oligarch, she even finds her own possible Prince Charming.
Anora, however, does not follow the same simple, Pretty Woman-esque path that its first act sets up. Instead, under the humanist, hilarious guide of writer-director Sean Baker, Anora assuredly zig-zags across its 139 minutes — becoming first an uplifting, dreams-come-true romance before suddenly careening into a nocturnal, one-long-night screwball comedy. The film is an ever-evolving farce — a class comedy about the folly of believing that sex and hope alone might be enough to buy you a better life — that respects its characters enough to not talk down to them.
It is decidedly not a fantasy, but there is an epic-ness to its empathy. Like Cinderella, there is also a heroine at the center of Anora whose dreams, hopes, and heartbreak are rendered so vibrantly that the film manages to reach out and wrap you in its embrace. While it’s easy to imagine a world in which Anora could have concluded like a familiar fairy tale, too, the place where it ends up is far slippier, richer, and harder to forget than the words “happily ever after” could possibly hope to surmise. It’s no wonder it won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival in May. It is as vital a piece of American filmmaking as any other we’ve seen this year.
We are brought into the world of Anora first through a shimmering haze of purple, pink, and blue lights. As the opening chords and lines of Greatest Day by Take That play, this mirage of color gives way to women’s bodies dancing on the laps of paying customers. At the end of this line of lap-dancers is Ani, whose confidence in the film’s strip club world is evident in her well-practiced movements, closed eyes, and checked-out expression, the latter of which is conveniently hidden from her customers. In this moment, Baker and Madison efficiently make it clear that stripping is a job to Ani, and as we watch her charmingly talk other men into paying for her services, including convincing one to “go to an ATM” with her, we realize just how good she is at it.
Her usual routine is interrupted when she’s asked by her boss to charm Ivan, a high-paying “spender” who has specifically requested a girl who can speak Russian. Ani, a Uzbek American who learned the language from her grandmother, is the right woman for the job. Shortly after she’s arrived on Ivan’s lap and the two have moved past their shared insecurity over their respective Russian and English speaking skills, Ani has convinced him to pay for a private dance. “God Bless America,” he whispers only a quick cut later as Ani nakedly grinds on him while — in one of Anora‘s broadest sexual innuendos — popping a bubble of gum. Afterward, Ivan asks Ani if she’s available “outside of the club,” and within several days, he’s convinced her not only to come away with him on a well-paid trip to Vegas but also marry him.
This opening stretch is elevated by Baker’s breathless filmmaking and Madison and Eydelshteyn’s dueling lead performances. As Ivan, Eydelshteyn is the perfect embodiment of oblivious, boyish charm — one whose immaturity is offset by how confidently he spends his parents’ money. Opposite him, Madison is mesmerizing. Baker’s screenplay simultaneously resists painting Ani as a solely tragic figure and avoids overcompensating for Hollywood’s bad track record when it comes to escorts by making her a perfect beacon of light. She is confident but intimated by Ivan’s wealth, and Madison plays Ani’s reaction to his proposal beautifully. There is a clear uncertainty in her eyes and voice — an innate understanding of Ivan’s immaturity and, therefore, thoughtlessness — but also an understandable yearning to believe that maybe, just maybe, life could be as good and simple as he promises. Some fantasies, it turns out, are too alluring for even the most disillusioned of us to deny.
In the aftermath of their shotgun wedding, Ani and Ivan run around Vegas while Take That sings “Let’s make a new start/ The future is ours to find” in Anora‘s sole reprisal of Greatest Day. This sequence, composed without an ounce of cynicism by Baker, will make you feel as though you are levitating in your seat. It doesn’t take long, however, for Ani and Ivan’s newlywed bliss to be destroyed. A few days later, a trio of henchmen — Toros (Karren Karagulian), Garnick (Vache Tovmasyan), and Igor (Yura Borisov) — sent by Ivan’s father force their way into his New York mansion. They take a screaming Ani hostage after Ivan flees, and Toros demands that she help them find her husband and annul their “fraud marriage” before Ivan’s parents make it to America. What follows is a shockingly funny nightlong search across New York that is tinged by Ani’s growing fear that her new chapter is already closing before it’s even begun.
This sickening feeling extends to the viewer. To say that Anora makes you pull for Ani would be a misrepresentation of its melancholic, humanist magic. You don’t just root for her; she roots herself in you. Madison’s performance, despite her brash Brooklyn accent, casts a quiet spell. Baker’s film is ultimately not just one of screwball antics and real-life romantic fantasies but of glances, namely those between Ani and her fellow service workers, whether they be a Vegas hotel clerk Ivan plays a cruel joke on or a gas station attendant who is forced to listen to Toros and Garnick’s bickering. In these silent exchanges exists an unspoken understanding and a collective 9-to-5 exhaustion. These are people whose shared perspective is made evident by their recognition of each other. It’s not just that they hold the same view of the world; they see the world the same way because they see each other.
Baker’s visual focus on tiny glances pays off in Anora‘s breathtaking second half. Ani is too much of a fighter to ever let her increasing anxiety and sorrow spill into her words or body language. But Madison’s eyes tell a different story than her character’s steely New Yorker demeanor. In them, we see both Ani’s world weariness and the desperate-optimism-bordering-on-delusion that forces her to believe Ivan might actually be enough of a Prince Charming to fight for her. It’s this silent battle between hope and resignation, which Madison plays as delicately as Baker writes it, that allows Ani to grab a hold of your heart and squeeze you into increasing anxiety and heartbreak the more it looks like her dreams are on the verge of being broken.
It is fitting that Baker has named the film after his heroine. Madison’s Ani is the heart and soul of Anora, and her dreams are its entire thematic landscape. In one of his most brilliant genre subversions, though, Baker does surround his heroine in Anora‘s back half with men who aren’t all that unlike herself. Toros, Garnick, and Igor are quickly revealed to be little more than service workers themselves — ones who are barely equipped to take a scrappy fighter like Ani hostage. They are hounded by the same financial and career insecurities as her, and just as desperate to hold onto their livelihoods. At one point, Toros responds to Ani’s begrudging help with a genuine, exhausted “thank you.” Ani also finds a sympathetic shoulder to lean on in Igor, who is given a surprising sensitivity and observant soul by Borisov, one of 2024’s most unexpected scene stealers.
In Igor and Ani’s bond, which develops — like everything else in Anora — beneath the surface of its absurdist plot, Baker is able to hone in on the film’s subtextual, largely visual ideas about the nature of seeing and being seen. It’s only after Igor begins to look at Ani head-on that we realize, with the benefit of hindsight, how much the early part of her and Ivan’s relationship was defined by them not actually making eye contact with each other. It’s perhaps because of this that Ivan is able to disregard the havoc he threatens to wreak on Ani’s life, and she is able to momentarily look past the transactional, disconnected aspect of their relationship. It is, on the one hand, a gift to truly be seen by another person, but it is also terrifying and threatening to one’s idea of oneself. Why else do you think all fairy tale romances begin with love at first sight?
Madison’s Ani, unfortunately, is not a princess. She may never reach the Cinderella Suite. That does not make her life a tragedy, though, and Anora, perhaps more than any of Baker’s other films, knows this. It lies to neither her nor the viewer, but rather finds the space for her to feel the hope and the grief that awaits her at the end of her New York odyssey. It’s a beautiful thing — realizing that there is more than one kind of happily ever after — but it is also heartbreaking. To accept a new ending for yourself is to let go of the one you’ve spent your whole life wanting, and that is a loss that lodges itself in your heart and makes the entire world seem slower and quieter than it did before. So does Anora.
Anora is playing in select theaters now.
