‘Anora’ Review

On Sean Baker’s clear-eyed sympathy.

‘Anora’ (MovieStillsDB)

Sean Baker is one of the most interesting filmmakers working today because of his clear-eyed sympathy. He sees people living on the margins of society as worthy of both our respect and our interest and our empathy without ever shying away from the fact that, for the most part, their messed-up lives are at least partly the result of their own decisions. Actions have consequences even when we feel as though no other actions can be taken.

In Anora, this sympathy manifests in intriguing ways. The setup is pretty straightforward, something like Pretty Woman moved from the streets and penthouses of Los Angeles to the strip clubs and oligarchal mansions of New York City. Ani (Mikey Madison) is a dancer at the topless bar HQ; as the movie opens, we see what that entails, and we see it all, and all of her. (This is not a movie for the generation that is scared of seeing naked people onscreen.) Cozy conversations leading to lap dances leading to late nights leading to regrets. Rinse and repeat.

All that changes when Ivan (Mark Eydelshteyn) shows up at HQ one night. He is smitten by Ani, who is pretty and speaks just enough Russian to make him feel more at home. After splashing a bunch of money around the club, she gives him her number. He asks her to come to her home and have sex with him in exchange for money; she does, and is struck by how expansive that home is. Ivan is the son of a Russian oligarch—whether oil or arms or something else is unclear, but his billions spend regardless—and he offers her $10,000 for a week of her time.

Time and, well, you know. We see them partying and screwing, him playing video games and them screwing, her lounging around his mansion and screwing. There’s a haphazard impulsiveness to their relationship, one funded by an endless stream of converted rubles and defined by simply doing whatever feels good at any given moment. Sometimes that’s drinking, sometimes it’s sex, sometimes it’s jetting off to Las Vegas and drinking and having sex and deciding in that drug-and-drink-infused neon haze to propose to the escort with whom you’ve been spending so much time.

I continue to emphasize that she is, in fact, a prostitute, because that fact, and her discomfort with that fact, is what drives the brilliant 90-minute middle of this movie. When Ivan’s parents hear of his impulsive decision to get married, they send a trio of Armenians—Orthodox priest Toros (Karren Karagulian), who is the family’s fixer and Ivan’s godfather; Toros’s brother Garnick (Vache Tovmasyan); and Garnick’s buddy Igor (Yura Borisov)—to ascertain what has happened. After Toros refers to her as an escort, Ani loses it, screaming that she is Ivan’s wife, pointing to the ring on her finger as if it’s a magical talisman.

Ivan, for his part, has fled the scene. Over the next hour-plus of screen time, Ani and the Armenians will try to find him, and their sojourn through the streets of New York is equal parts Cassavetes urban odyssey and Coenesque farce. I won’t spoil how it plays out—half the fun of this movie is watching all of these hopelessly out-of-their-depth individuals muddle toward a resolution that will satisfy a family of deranged Russian oligarchs—but keep a special eye on Igor. Borisov’s face—which constantly betrays a sort of uncomprehending but resigned-to-his-fate hurt—conveys more information than a hundred lines of dialogue could.

I want to bring this back to Ani and Ivan, though, because how you respond to this movie will likely be determined by how you view their relationship. Ivan isn’t a villain so much as a callow child; at one point, Ani desperately says to him “You are an adult. You are an adult,” as if willing it to be true through repetition. But Ivan isn’t an adult in any meaningful sense. He has no job, no obligations. He plays video games all day, he posts selfies on Instagram, he gets high and drunk and throws parties and causes trouble for everyone around him. She says “You are an adult” as though it’s an incantation, a spell that will snap him out of his play world.

And he responds to it thusly: “I need to talk to my parents.”

From there, it’s fairly obvious how their relationship will play out. There’s a surface reading of this film that the Russian family is merely monstrous. And, sure, they are: Ivan treats Ani like a plaything, casually breaking her hopes and dreams like a Ninja Turtle action figure that has reached the end of its usefulness. But the fact remains that Ani herself is a gold-digger. She may have feelings for Ivan, but what she really has feelings for is a way out of her squalor, a way into a better life. She is, in her own way, childish and childlike: when Toros describes her as an escort, she goes into a screaming rage. She thinks their (hasty, inebriated) marriage is inviolable and she is owed some fantastic sum to dissolve it because that’s how she believes the game is played. But again, this is a child’s understanding of the rules. She doesn’t even understand which league she’s playing in, a fact that Ivan’s mother makes very clear once they meet.

Again, none of this means we can’t sympathize with Ani. But she can be both sympathetic and fundamentally mistaken. Sympathizing with her does not require ignoring that her own choices in life are what brought her to this moment.

‘Red Rocket’ (MovieStillsDB)

This is a running theme throughout Baker’s work. One can sympathize with the transgender prostitutes in Tangerine and acknowledge that they have hopes and dreams while also understanding that it is their own actions that have brought them to the streets on which we find them struggling to survive. The Florida Project features one of the few true innocents in Baker’s recent run of films—the little girl Moonee, the 6-year-old daughter of a motel-living prostitute played with heartbreaking depth by Brooklynn Kimberly Prince—and it is through her awful living situation that we come to judge the actions of the adults around her.

Red Rocket remains the most interesting of Baker’s films. Set in 2016, with that year’s presidential election playing out on TVs and billboards in the background, it is the defining film of the Trump era. It’s about a guy (Mikey Saber, played by Simon Rex) who rolls into a working-class town and, like the devil himself, convinces everyone in it to debase themselves for his benefit. He’s a charming rogue and an utter sociopath, caring little about the destruction left in his wake so long as he gets what he wants.

But, and this is important, he only does so with the acquiescence of everyone around him. He doesn’t make the neighbor kid take responsibility for something that will land him in jail. He doesn’t forcibly traffic his 17-year-old girlfriend into a life of pornography. He doesn’t stick a gun in anyone’s face to turn the local donut shop into a drug den. He just … exists. And warps everyone around him.

I don’t think Anora is quite as good as Red Rocket, though it does capture something very real about our intensely childish, deeply selfish times. And it closes with the perfect final shot, Ani realizing the transactional nature of her life, of every relationship she has ever had, of the way her work has warped who she is and how she interacts with everyone around her.

Would that we all receive such a moment of clarity.