In Sean Baker’s latest film, a young exotic dancer from Brighton Beach embarks on a freewheeling odyssey after meeting—and marrying—a Russian party-boy oligarch.
Mikey Madison as Ani in Anora. Courtesy Neon.
Anora, written and directed by Sean Baker,
now playing in theaters in New York City and Los Angeles
• • •
Whether set in less-traveled quarters of coastal metropolises or small towns in the South, the films of Sean Baker focus on protagonists living on the edges, toiling in marginalized occupations: food delivery (Take Out, 2004), street vending (Prince of Broadway, 2008), and, frequently, sex work (all of his features since Starlet, 2012). Baker observes his characters and their milieus with warmth and compassion; his movies, for the most part, abjure sentimentality and prurience. His casts are almost always composed of first-time or little-known performers, their lack of familiarity underscoring the quasi-vérité aspect of his work. A pinwheeling energy propels several of his films, like Tangerine (2015), which tracks an enraged transwoman prostitute, her BFF in tow, as she storms down seedy stretches of Santa Monica Boulevard in search of her cheating pimp boyfriend, and The Florida Project (2017), invigorated by a trio of tykes who run riot at the grim motel complexes where they live, just outside Disney World. Anora, Baker’s latest, may be the most madcap of his projects to date—yet one that, by its final act, edges a little too closely to mawkishness.
Cast in Anora. Courtesy Neon.
The film’s opening scene briskly establishes the on-the-clock rhythms of its heroine, Ani (Mikey Madison), deep into her shift at HQ Gentlemen’s Club, in far west Midtown Manhattan. A slo-mo pan (scored to Take That’s aggressively optimistic “Greatest Day,” a cut that clangs slightly with too-easy irony) reveals the twenty-three-year-old and a few of her coworkers grinding away on clients’ laps. Blue and pink light plays across Ani’s skin; her head thrown back, she seems to laugh at a private joke or a memory. Next we see her expertly work the room: in between insouciant vape puffs, she flatters and flirts, leading men by the hand from the ATM to a VIP chamber. Her more specialized talents will be called upon later that night, after a young Russian, Ivan (Mark Eydelshteyn), requests someone who can speak his language; Ani, a third-generation immigrant, ends her meal break early to chat him up. (Her given name, its old-country associations abhorrent to her, gives the film its title.) Satisfied with Ani’s services at HQ, Ivan asks her whether she’s available for assignments outside the club—first an afternoon of sex and then a full week of being his exclusive, live-in girlfriend.
Mark Eydelshteyn as Ivan and Mikey Madison as Ani in Anora. Courtesy Neon.
The gigs give Ani a reprieve from her interminable commute to and from the club on the Q train, which rattles just outside her bedroom window in the dingy Brighton Beach duplex she shares with her waspish older sister. Ivan, the wastrel twenty-one-year-old son of an oligarch, amazes Ani with his tricked-out mansion, a modernist monstrosity in Mill Basin—a little-filmed Brooklyn neighborhood, one of the many featured pockets in the borough that buoy Anora with vivifying location details. Those zesty specifics extend to the highly credible Kings County accent affected by Madison, a native Angeleno (who is best known for her role as the oldest of three daughters on the 2016–22 FX series Better Things). A TV star in Russia in his first English-language project here, Eydelshteyn impresses with his skill at making Ivan both goofily charming—sliding around his tacky palazzo in his socks; doing a backward somersault in bed, giddy with anticipation before the first time he and Ani have sex (unsurprisingly, he is terrible at it)—and irredeemably entitled and heedless.
Mark Eydelshteyn as Ivan and Mikey Madison as Ani in Anora. Courtesy Neon.
Ivan’s wealth and whim are such that a friend’s offhand remark during a typical night of partying—about the high quality of ketamine to be found in Las Vegas—is all it takes for the scion to fly himself, Ani, and his pals on a private plane to Sin City, where a mammoth penthouse suite is always at his disposal. Their bacchanalian adventures in the gambling capital proceed with dizzying, galvanic momentum (a pace aided by Baker’s sharp editing, which he’s done for all of his films), culminating in Ani and Ivan’s exchange of wedding vows at the Little White Chapel.
Mark Eydelshteyn as Ivan and Mikey Madison as Ani in Anora. Courtesy Neon.
While Ani may not get the honeymoon she hoped for—a trip to Disney World, a dream destination since childhood—she’s more than content to say farewell to HQ for good, to think of herself in a legitimately loving relationship, to cuddle up against Ivan on the couch during one of his video-game binges. But their Mill Basin idyll ends when word gets back to his parents in the motherland about their son’s scandalous marriage. Mama and Papa order Brooklyn-based Armenian hireling Toros (Baker regular Karren Karagulian), who’s been tasked with minding Ivan for most of the brat’s life, to get the union annulled—a job that requires the extra muscle of Toros’s adjutant, a compatriot named Garnick (Vache Tovmasyan), and Russian roughneck Igor (Yura Borisov), who burst in on the couple at home. Ivan lams it; Ani, confronted with a bewildering, humiliating situation, responds with gales of ferocity, Madison plumbing ever greater depths of feral rage.
Yura Borisov as Igor, Mikey Madison as Ani, Vache Tovmasyan as Garnick, and Karren Karagulian as Toros in Anora. Courtesy Neon.
Yet this pint-size force has no choice but to aid Toros and company in their frantic quest to track down the runaway groom. This odyssey, which begins during a pallid late afternoon in the dead of winter at Brightwater Towers in Coney Island and ends about twelve hours later on Centre Street in Lower Manhattan, advances with screwball zippiness, coming to a halt with the arrival of Ivan’s parents at JFK. While Ani is subject to stinging mortification by the dissolute boy’s mother (Darya Ekamasova), the film, ever more overtly, makes clear that this outmatched young woman at least has a gallant admirer in Igor, her class equal. But does she need such approbation? Anora’s concluding scene seems to suggest that the love of a good man, whose own profession exists in the shadow economy, might salve the wounds of its disgraced heroine. This tilt to melodrama has the effect of distorting all that’s come before—a dose of ketamine added dangerously late to what has otherwise been a steady infusion of stimulants.
Melissa Anderson is the film editor of 4Columns and the author of a monograph on David Lynch’s Inland Empire from Fireflies Press.