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Anora

Sean Baker has been making low budget, grungy-looking films for a while now, so it was probably a bit of a surprise when he won the Palme d'Or at Cannes with Anora. The first third of this stripper/sex worker story pings along at a nice pace. It begins to go slightly baggy in the middle third but recomposes itself for the home straight. Mikey Madison plays Anora (or Ani), an erotic dancer in a club where it looks like the majority of the dosh comes from private lap-dances - she has issues with her boss not paying health insurance and holiday benefits. Madison is a natural in this medium (my notes for this say "Is she an actual stripper? Check.")

One night, Ani is requested to translate and maybe dance for, a young Russian guy, Ivan (Mark Eydelshteyn), who immediately takes a shine to her and invites her to come to his place the next day. Ani realises she's hit pay dirt when she arrives at his mansion, and his goofy, sweet nature endears him to her even more. Post-shag, he wonders if she'd be keen to rent herself to him for a week of rooting and tooting. For the right price, she agrees.

When a couple of days in Las Vegas winds up with the two of them married, events begin to snowball, the main issue being that Ivan's uber-rich parents won't abide this union. Cue the hired help - a fixer priest and a couple of goons - for a visit to the mansion. Here's where the film starts to verge into farce, and while this sequence is pretty funny and quite well performed, it lingers a bit too long and has the potential to derail the whole film. In a nutshell, Ivan does a runner and the trio of heavies, plus Ani, set out into the night to find him.

This section could really have been tighter but the characters do their best to keep us on the hook. Boss Toros (Karren Karagulian), his brother Garnick (Vache Tovmasyan), and Igor (Yuri Borisov, from the great Compartment No. 6) are equal parts menacing and goofy in their quest, though I felt Baker might have enlisted an assistant editor for this middle segment (he wrote, directed, cast AND edited the film!).

The climax rips up the fairy tale with the folks arriving from Russia and laying the filthy cards on the table. There's a fantastic hint at a 'Hollywood' moment that properly smacks into a wall of reality when Ani briefly takes a stance, before Ivan's mother clarifies things for her. Bleak as fuck but honest too. The film doesn't sugar coat too much (though some of the characters could have been nastier) and it's quite affecting when we see that Ani's only way to respond to a kindness is to use her sexuality. She's a pure product of her environment.

Anora opens around Australia on Dec 26th. See it at Luna and Palace cinemas, among others.

See also:

Time for a bit of a delve into Baker's canon, including Tangerine (2015), The Florida Project (2017) and Red Rocket (2021) - I've seen none of these so can't legally recommend, but I'll get to them one day. An older film about a sex worker is Alan J. Pakula's Klute (1971), starring the fantastic Jane Fonda and Donald Sutherland.

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