New York City can be an icy place even without its freezing temperatures. Colder, if you aren’t blessed with the basic privileges to survive in its margins. On the surface, Sean Baker’s powerful, spirited and rollicking “Anora” unfolds wildly with an often-comedic tone, through several impeccably orchestrated, high-energy set pieces laced with wise-cracking troupers. But lurking beneath that shine is that New York chill you can’t help but feel in your bones, even when this often sexy and steamy film conceals it. On the whole, what Baker has created here is nothing short of pure movie magic— his smartly interwoven urban machinations make you giggle and inexplicably tear up on repeat (sometimes within the same sequence), while somehow keeping you acutely aware of the sorrow that is bound to rise to the surface.
In other words, “Anora” is boundlessly alive with a quality we’ve seen continually in the movies of Baker, among the most humanist filmmakers working today. There is joy next to sadness. There is comedy inside a tragedy. Often wisely and compassionately vocal about the need to destigmatize it, Baker has told stories about sex work and sex workers before. But “Anora,” a film about the eponymous escort, operates at a different register, only because the pitch-perfect emotional note it culminates into catches us off guard, even though the signs that it’s coming for our hearts and souls are posted everywhere.
When we first Mikey Madison’s vivacious Russian-American Ani (short for Anora), we know that exotic dancing and sex work is a matter-of-fact livelihood for her. Living a modest life, she isn’t waiting around for a knight in shining armor to whisk her away from the club she works at. She just goes about her business with her clientele, and bickers with the other girls in the same profession—some, her genuine friends, and others, her rivals. But this is in part a Cinderella story, so the knight does appear one day. He is Ivan (Mark Eydelshteyn), the prodigal son of a Russian oligarch. He enlists Ani’s services one night and despite Ivan’s apparent lack of attention—he is so scattered and motormouth that you wonder if he suffers from a disorder—the two hit it off rapidly. She becomes his American fantasy (“God Bless America!” we hear him groan in one scene), and he becomes her generous high-roller, bringing her out to his giant seaside mansion in Brooklyn for a fancy New Year’s Eve party and other affairs. The place, fashioned with utmost attention to character detail by production designer Stephen Phelps, is kind of like Ivan, and maybe like his family, too. Clearly touched by heaps of money, but somehow, not all that lovely, cozy, or welcoming. Still, the duo continue to have some fun during and after their transactional rendezvouses. And before we know it, Ivan pops the question during a Vegas trip.
Yes, there are freewheeling shopping sprees and happy days (as happy as one can be with the aloof Ivan), but this big-hearted screwball comedy gets its earnest start after all that, once Ivan’s rich folks back home hear the news of their son’s marriage to an escort. To annul and dissolve the marriage, they turn to Toros (Karren Karagulian), a local priest who keeps an eye on the family’s Stateside affairs and their often troublemaking son, who just overspends, plays video games and causes headaches. His helpers are Garnick (Vache Tovmasyan) and Igor (Yura Borisov), two clueless hoodlums tasked to get Anora out of the family home. Little do they know that she has teeth, a fighting spirit and more backbone than any of them could handle.
Among writer-director Baker’s (and his producing partner and spouse Samantha Quan’s) many gifts is exquisite casting, and one wonders if the steely Madison’s short but memorable “Once Upon A Time In Hollywood” performance is what landed her the title role here. As Anora, Madison—easily among this year’s greatest performers—is simply a force of nature like you’d remember from the Quentin Tarantino picture: angry, fiery, fierce and tough-as-nails. Here though, she has a layer of vulnerability too, something she manages to hide from most people. But not from us, and certainly not from Igor. Entering Anora’s home as a thug-for-hire at first across a stunning real-time home-invasion, both hilarious and faultlessly choreographed, Igor gradually notices something fragile about Anora. She might miss what he’s seeing, but being the wise filmmaker that he is, Baker makes sure that we all see what he’s seeing (and more importantly, that he’s seeing it).
That observational undercurrent drives much of the film’s stormy emotions across chases in the wintry streets of Brooklyn and Manhattan at night, captured gorgeously on film stock, with limited but textured tones by DP Drew Daniels. Thanks to his attentive lens, some of the city’s less glamorous corners as Toros and his team look for ways to invalidate Ivan and Ani’s marital bliss quickly acquire a lived-in quality—you will recognize this New York from the city’s cinematic history from the ‘70s, even if you’ve never set foot in NYC before.
And about that marital bliss…it’s no surprise that it was never all that real to begin with, not when your partner-in-crime is someone as wealthy and untrustworthy as Ivan. Baker’s films are often about class, and that sensibility settles everywhere across “Anora” when it becomes clear that Ani’s seeming enemies are basically her spiritual kin—workers that Ivan’s family just throws money at and exploits. Quietly, an allegiance occurs before our eyes whether the people who form it are aware of it or not. And it’s downright touching to witness the silent solidarity.
“Anora” is both thrilling and heartbreaking, both boisterous and shatteringly sad. But rest assured, no one you’ll come to care about in this miracle of a film will be left without a trace of hope, even after an ending that arrives like a gut-punch. Having filled their lives with so much tenderness and well-researched details, Baker cares about them just as much. It’s the humanist in him.
This review was filed from the Toronto International Film Festival. It opens on September 27th,
