Following on from his forensic analysis of grifting in small-town Texas in Red Rocket (2021), director Sean Baker turns his attention to the world of the ultrarich, for Anora, his most expansive canvas to date.
★★★☆☆
You’ve seen many a character like Anora in movies before, though their screentime seems rarely to exceed the five-minute mark before being promptly shuffled out of view. 23 years old and already possessed of an enterprising eye, Ani (Mikey Madison) sets out each night from her cramped New York apartment and goes about her work at a Manhattan strip club with unfussy professionalism.
Her co-workers and even bosses are friends and confidants, all at this long enough to know that one eye should always be on the lookout for bigger fish with deeper pockets. For his part, Ivan (Mark Eydelshteyn) is one such fish, a sweetly stupid Russian man of 21 (though he seems younger) with a seemingly limitless supply of wealth and a liking for Ani that – as she quickly susses – will likely prove beneficial for them both. He wants to stick it to his much-loathed oligarch parents, and she savours the luxuries of his sprawling mansion. From this meeting of wayward souls, could true love blossom?
When Ivan’s parents catch wind of just what the boy’s been up to, this not-quite-star-crossed union runs into harsher realities, Director of Photography Drew Daniels stripping away the Vegas glitz and glamour until only grey winter daylight remains. It is here that writer -director Sean Baker exercises the resolutely unsentimental generosity that has become his calling card; the kind of consideration that allows everyone down to the smallest bit player to behave unflatteringly.
It’s easy enough to envision a version of Baker’s film centering Eydelshteyn’s vapid boy prince, that his American squeeze is only a brief comic blip on his own road to maturation. The same goes for Toros, (Baker regular Karren Karagulian), the sad-sack enforcer left with the impossible task of babysitting the boy, or Igor (Yura Borisov), the soulful henchman determined to hench to the best of his abilities in spite of a burgeoning respect for Ani’s grit. That Baker takes her side in a story determined to discard her naturally aligns both Anora and Anora with a lineage of sex worker protagonists spanning Baker’s whole filmography.
Be it the fraught familial bond of Tangerine’s intrepid heroines or the flop sweat scheming of Simon Rex’s predatory porn pariah in Red Rocket, Baker has time and again been drawn to just how these strivers on the margins of U.S. capitalism fight to get ahead, get even or just get by. As her predicament worsens, it’s abundantly clear to both Ani and us that all of these outcomes are pipe dreams. Steamrolled at every turn by a family whose scolding gaze looks straight through her on its way to reprimand the flailing prodigal son, her fight can seem like no less than a battle to break free of a script that stubbornly resists all changes. She never stood a chance.
Anora earns its final sense of bitter defeat, then, but one can’t shake the feeling that it took a shortcut to get there. For all his ostensible hardscrabble humanism, Baker has a weakness for allegory, one that can handicap our sense of the real human beings at the centre of his stories. One thinks back, for instance, on the heavy-hanging spectre of the 2016 election in Red Rocket, the better to underline the connection between his fictional all-American con man and another, all too real one. Then, perhaps, to the looming shadow of Disneyland in The Florida Project, the better to emphasise what remains so close but so far out of reach for its poverty-stricken young leads.
There’s little doubt that Baker’s sympathies lie with Ani, but come the end of her eventful week, we feel we scarcely know her at all. Does she really believe she loves Ivan? That he loves her? It would seem that, to some degree, Baker thinks so, but the assertion is ill at ease with the flinty street smarts he and Madison have characterised her with.
Baker lays out a clear argument that, irrespective of her profession, Anora is as entitled to dignity and fair treatment as anyone, and undeserving of being picked up and set down again like oh-so-many of the idle rich’s casual playthings. Then, having made his point, he promptly sets her down and exits stage right. Whatever her actual wants may be – besides the money, of course – they remain mysterious. After all, she was only here to make a point.
The Verdict
A pseudo rom com turned scathing indictment of the uber wealthy’s curt dismissal of those with neither station nor power, Sean Baker’s latest is as bleakly and compulsively watchable as anything he has made. Still, there is a nagging hollowness at its core that a fine star turn can only do so much to mitigate. Anora’s will is wholly secondary to the whims of her wealthy clients, just as her personhood is ultimately subordinated to a filmmakers’ allegory. Wherever he next turns his focus, Baker’s next would benefit from foregrounding people instead of points.
Words by Thomas Messner
Anora is in cinemas now
Support the Indiependent
We’re trying to raise £200 a month to help cover our operational costs. This includes our ‘Writer of the Month’ awards, where we recognise the amazing work produced by our contributor team. If you’ve enjoyed reading our site, we’d really appreciate it if you could donate to The Indiependent. Whether you can give £1 or £10, you’d be making a huge difference to our small team.