Anora: A Stripper, A Rich Kid… and How America Looks Right Now
By Liz Braun
Rating: A+
Anora is a subversive Cinderella story. It’s a tale about class divides and the hired help, particularly the hired help expected to move seamlessly between disparate worlds — sex workers, bodyguards, limo drivers.
In Anora, a young stripper from Brighton Beach marries the son of a Russian oligarch, and then has to deal with the chaos when his powerful parents find out. The parents demand an annulment.
This is an observant, energetic tale from writer-director Sean Baker, and like his other projects (Tangerine, Red Rocket, The Florida Project), it’s populated by a ragtag crowd of the dispossessed and disenfranchised.
Anora is frenetic and entertaining and sometimes very funny, but it will break your heart.
The film opens in a frenzy of writhing female bodies: the lap dance room of an upscale New York strip club.
Mikey Madison stars as Anora — she’s called Ani — and for her language skills Ani is the go-to girl at the club for Russian-speaking clients. That’s how she gets lined up with Ivan (Mark Eydelshteyn), a rich kid who proves to be good company.
Ani and Ivan spend a mad, bad, wonderful week together, days and nights fuelled by sex, drugs, money and partying on a spontaneous trip to Vegas. And they have a spontaneous wedding in Vegas.
When news gets to Ivan’s obscenely rich parents about the marriage, all hell breaks loose. They send in the hired help: a family retainer (Karren Karagulian) and a couple of other goons (Vache Tovmasyan and Yuri Borisov) to retrieve the groom and get rid of the bride.
The ostensible bad guys who come around to break up Ani and Ivan don’t scare her much. Ivan runs off but Ani goes toe-to-toe with the so-called muscle sent to dislodge her from Ivan’s house.
Ani is resourceful and smart, and the scenes between her and the bad guys are comical and Damon Runyon-esque, to a point. There’s a sweetness to Anora that starts to drain out of the film at this point, just as Ani’s disillusionment begins to settle in.
She is powerless in front of Ivan’s terrifying mother (Darya Ekamasova) and formidable father (Aleksey Serebryakov), when they turn up to claim their son.
Here are people — the father especially — for whom everyone is hired help. Everyone. Everyone else can be controlled, convinced, coerced or cashed out. Or killed, probably.
Ivan’s sinister mother, who no doubt works hard every day to keep her particular hired help position, lectures Ani about bringing shame upon the family; so many very rich people brandish that sort of pseudo-Christian moral hectoring that it must be almost as effective as money at controlling others.
Anora is all about what the American Dream currently looks like. All the performances in the film are terrific. All the characters are fully three-dimension, and the filmmaker’s affection for his cast is evident. Baker’s ability to telegraph a person’s backstory and emotional status in a single sentence is astounding.
Expect to see more of Mikey Madison during awards season for her portrayal of a vulnerable young woman still learning how to grow protective armour. Anora won the Palme d’Or at Cannes earlier this year and was in the running for TIFF’s 2024 People’s Choice Award.
Anora. Written and directed by Sean Baker. Starring Mikey Madison, Mark Eydelshteyn, and Karren Karagulian. In theatres October 25.