We meet the titular character (Mikey Madison), an exotic dancer and sex worker, during the initial credit sequence in Sean Baker’s Palme d’Or-winning arch drama. She’s predictably grinding on the lap of a customer in a small, sectioned off booth, in the middle of a pretty lucrative night. But Baker isn’t using the moment as a scold, demonstrating the dehumanization of her profession, nor as a thirsty titillation, trying to hook the viewer with a sleazy promise of things to come.
Rather, the camera moves closer to her face, breezy and pleased, with the glowing orange orbs of light behind her in blurred bokeh. It’s peaceful and calming, despite the setting, a woman in control of her space and element.
Baker’s pronounced humanism is one of his strongest superpowers as a director. Whether they are trans sex workers (Tangerine), young children living in a motel (The Florida Project), or con artists new to town (Red Rocket), his generosity with his characters — you get the idea that Baker absolutely adores all of his characters, even the more horrible ones — always shines through. His ability to tell their stories without condemnation or judgment allows him emotional access into people who would otherwise remain unknown and unremarked upon.
Anora, who goes by Ani, has her typical night coaxing patrons into personalized performances interrupted when her manager at the Midtown Manhattan strip club introduces her to Ivan (Mark Eidelshtein), a young, doe-eyed Russian reveler, whose father is an unspecified Russian oligarch with more money than several small countries’ GDP put together.
They hit it off pretty well, with Ani’s halting Russian a bridge for Ivan’s halting English, such that at the end of the night, he requests her phone number and she gives it to him. The next day, he invites her to come to his mansion — a modern, architectural adornment overlooking a bay somewhere outside the city — for a more serious paying gig. “What would you like?” Ani asks him, after he’s whisked her up to his winding bedroom. “Sex!” he yells out in frisky jubilation, stripping off his clothes and doing a reverse somersault into position on his giant bed.
Soon, he’s inviting her to one of his insanely opulent parties for New Year’s, and doesn’t want her to leave him. Instead, he wants Ani to work with him exclusively for a week, an offer she negotiates at a rate that seems appropriate. On a whim one night, he takes her and some friends on the private jet to Vegas, where they party like mad, and burn through the nights like rock stars. It is in this setting that Ivan asks Ani to marry him.
Naturally, she’s skeptical at first, but he convinces her he’s entirely serious. If she marries him, he reasons, he will be made an American, and his parents, back in the homeland, won’t be able to bother him. The young couple have their mini-nuptials, and return to New York, where Ani quits her job with much fanfare, and tries to settle into her new role as wife to a billionaire’s scion.
It is not long before word of this union gets to Toros (Karren Karagulian), the family fixer, tasked with overseeing Ivan while he’s in America. To his horror, his dispatched operatives, negotiator Garnick (Vache Tovmasyan), and muscle Nick (Paul Weissman), confirm the existence of an official wedding certificate. Worse, in the ensuing scramble to get the couple to face the situation, Ivan flees out the front door and past the security gate, with Garnick chasing after him, while Nick tries to contain the growing fury of Ani, as she attempts to run away with her husband.
With Ivan on the loose and escaped, Toros has no choice but to gather his two battered men — Ani does a double kick to Garnick’s face, breaking his nose, and bites Nick so hard on the neck she leaves a welt — along with Ani to try and track down her wayward husband before his flabbergasted parents arrive from Russia, about ready to lay waste to the lot of them.
Baker’s film, which he also wrote, retains much of what makes so many of his other films so personable and engaging: The gentle insight into his characters, whom the film refuses to judge (even the oligarch — played by Aleksey Serebryakov — is shown in a sort of benevolently comedic light), and the harder edges of the worlds they inhabit, without the standard added drama of violence and moral depravity. As tense as things get — in one scene, Toros jumps into his car as it’s being hauled away by a tow truck, and literally burns the rubber of his back tires to break free of the clutches of the wheel lift — there is never the threat, implied or otherwise, of serious physical danger. There are no guns, and, other than Ani’s furious beat-down of Toros’ operatives, no bodily harm.
Despite its abundance of energy, the film runs and feels long, at 139 minutes, and at times the scenes are stretched too thin. The centerpiece brawl at Ivan’s mansion, as fun the mayhem is, still feels too repetitive, as if Baker wasn’t entirely sure what notes to hit, so he engages a great number of them over and over again. Baker often encourages cast improvisation in his films, a quality that often adds depth to the performances, but here, he might have fallen a bit too hard for the actors’ work. That scene in particular — with its comic violence, and beleaguered muscle, as close to a Coen brothers’ affair as Baker is ever likely to get — has to do too much to set up the climax, which has Ani, her feckless husband, Toros’ team, and Ivan’s formidable parents all flying back to Vegas, straining even this director’s expansive credibility.
Still, the final scene, one of the best in the film, as Ani returns home, is a tour de force for Madison, rightly receiving accolades from across the globe for her performance. It is only there, in the stultifying confines of an old, battered car, that she finally lets her considerable guard down, revealing the humiliation and suffering she’s been having to endure. In that searing moment, Baker peels back the layers of his own creation. The film might not always meet the moment, but it certainly closes with an emotional thunderclap. In the end, there is no gloss, or comedic sheen, only a shattered young woman having to contend with the inherent inequity of her world.
