Gold Derby, a site devoted to Oscar predictions, currently ranks Sean Baker’s Anora as the film most likely to win Best Picture in 2025. Already recipient of the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, this is the latest slice of life from a writer-director who’s devoted himself to telling nonjudgmental stories about people on the fringes of mainstream American culture — sex workers (Tangerine), unhoused families (The Florida Project), hustlers (Red Rocket). While early award predictions are hit or miss, you might want to catch Anora now at the Essex Cinemas, Majestic 10 in Williston or Savoy Theater in Montpelier.
The deal
Twenty-three-year-old Ani (Mikey Madison) spends her nights giving lap dances at a high-end Manhattan strip club and her days sleeping in the drab Brighton Beach house she shares with her sister. One night the club’s owner asks her to entertain Ivan (Mark Eydelshteyn), the young son of a Russian oligarch, whose language Ani learned from her immigrant grandmother.
Soon Ivan is paying Ani to service him in his parents’ Brooklyn mansion, be his “girlfriend” at swanky parties and even jet to Vegas with him. When he proposes marriage to her one liquor-sodden night in Sin City, she doesn’t hesitate for long.
But the course of true love rarely runs smooth, even when you’re young, hot and abruptly rich beyond your wildest dreams. News of Ivan’s new bride reaches Russia, and his horrified parents send their Stateside fixer (Karren Karagulian) to get the marriage annulled. Can Ani hang on to her man and her meal ticket — even when the “man” in question is acting more like a spoiled boy?
Will you like it?
Anora is unclassifiable in modern Hollywood. Like the mostly unsung Uncut Gems, it’s a New York movie with an unfashionably pungent sense of place, and it’s rowdy, raunchy, comic and tragic. The poster pairs a photo of the rapturous Ani and Ivan in Vegas with a tagline describing the movie as “a love story,” but that juxtaposition is straight-up misdirection.
Even before the strongmen arrive to break up Ani’s marriage, the audience can see this is no fairy tale. Ivan’s idea of romance is playing video games with Ani draped over his lap, surrounded by his bong collection. He’s a wastrel heir — a character type rarely seen in today’s movies but a staple of 1930s screwball comedies. That’s the genre Anora most resembles once it hits its stride, with Madison giving a star-making performance that evokes a foul-mouthed Carole Lombard in platforms.
The film’s first half portrays Ani’s daily life and her whirlwind “love story” in brief scenes that show the documentary-esque restraint for which Baker is known. A naïve viewer might be forgiven for thinking they’re watching an artier version of an MTV reality show about rich kids at play. Savvier ones know that Ani’s baby-voiced sweetness is a role she plays for men, but we have no idea who she is underneath. The narrative skips lightly through time like a daydream, and only an occasional lingering shot of the servants who clean up Ivan’s messes hints at rude awakenings to come.
Most of the second half, by contrast, takes place over about a day and locks us down in an all-too-real city sunk in winter gloom. When the fixer arrives, Anora shifts gears into a full-on comedy of errors, with the characters struggling haplessly to master an ever-more-chaotic situation. What they experience as an ordeal is way more fun for the audience, as we see new sides of Ani and savor the character thumbnails of various henchmen, especially the comic timing of Yura Borisov as a laconic tough named Igor. It all leads to a masterful and surprisingly touching conclusion.
Is Anora a comedy, though? Or a tragedy? Ani remains something of a cipher, her rise and fall an absurdist reversal of the American dream. She’s mouthy and fierce, like many of the heroines of Baker’s movies, but none of that gives her power in a world larger than the strip club, ruled by norms she has no clue how to navigate.
If you’ve seen screwball comedies, you know they could be darker and more irreverent than today’s rom-coms. (In Nothing Sacred, for instance, Lombard plays a grifter so desperate to escape her dull life in Vermont that she masquerades as a dying “radium girl.”) The Great Depression was no distant memory then, and the jokes often came with a whiff of economic desperation.
Anora suggests an attempt to create a modern equivalent to those movies, capitalizing on our current sense of precarity. The pieces never quite gel, because Baker’s analytic distance from Ani keeps her struggles from becoming ours. But the movie fuses enough art and crowd-pleasing elements to remind us that populist cinema can and should make us think.
If you like this, try…
Tangerine (2015; Hulu, Kanopy, Netflix, Pluto, PLEX, Redbox, Sling TV, Tubi, rentable): If you enjoyed Ani, you’ll also like the wild women of Baker’s breakout film, shot on an iPhone, about two trans sex workers in Los Angeles having a Christmas Eve to remember.
The Florida Project (2017; Kanopy, Max, YouTube Primetime, rentable): Baker’s next project chronicled the life of a rambunctious 6-year-old living in a seedy motel in the shadow of Disney World.
American Honey (2016; Kanopy, Max, rentable): Andrea Arnold’s road movie about a teen (Sasha Lane) who joins a traveling sales crew covers some similar ground to Anora but gets deeper into its protagonist’s head.
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This article appears in Nov 20-26, 2024.
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