New York City can be a frigid place even without its frigid temperatures. Colder still, if you’re not lucky enough to have the basic privileges to survive on its fringes. On the surface, Sean Baker’s powerful, energetic, unbridled “Anora” unfolds in a riotous fashion with an often comedic tone, through several impeccably orchestrated and high-energy scenes, peppered with witty characters. But lurking beneath that sheen is that New York chill that you can’t help but feel in your bones, even as this often sexy and passionate film hides it. Overall, what Baker has created here is nothing short of pure cinematic magic: his cleverly interwoven urban machinations make you laugh and, inexplicably, cry over and over again (sometimes within the same sequence), while somehow keeping you acutely aware of the pain that’s bound to bubble to the surface.
In other words, “Anora” is full of life and a quality we’ve seen continually in the films of Baker, one of the most humanistic filmmakers working today. There’s joy alongside sadness. There’s comedy within tragedy. Baker, who often wisely and compassionately expresses the need to destigmatize it, has told stories about sex work and sex workers before. But “Anora,” a film about the eponymous escort, works on a different register, only because the perfect emotional note on which it ends takes us by surprise, even though the signs that it’s coming for our hearts and souls are posted everywhere.
When we first meet vivacious Russian-American Ani (short for Anora) played by Mikey Madison, we learn that exotic dancing and sex work are her regular livelihood. She leads a modest life and doesn’t wait for a knight in shining armor to whisk her away from the club where she works. She just goes about her business with her clientele and bickers with the other girls in the same profession – some her true friends, some her rivals. But this is partly a Cinderella story, so the knight shows up one day. It’s Ivan (Mark Eydelshteyn), the prodigal son of a Russian oligarch. He hires Ani’s services one night, and despite Ivan’s apparent inattention (he’s so scattered and talkative that one wonders if he suffers from some disorder), the two quickly hit it off. She becomes his American fantasy (“God bless America!” we hear him moan in one scene), and he becomes her generous gambler, whisking her away to his gigantic seaside mansion in Brooklyn for a swanky New Year’s Eve party and other events. The place, designed with the utmost attention to character detail by production designer Stephen Phelps, is a bit like Ivan — and maybe his family, too. Clearly touched by oodles of money, but somehow, not all that charming, cozy, or welcoming. Still, the duo continue to have fun during and after their transactional encounters. And before we know it, Ivan pops the question during a trip to Las Vegas.
Yes, there are wild shopping sprees and happy days (as happy as you can be with the aloof Ivan), but this big-hearted, screwball comedy really begins after all that, when Ivan’s wealthy relatives back home learn the news of their son’s marriage to a prostitute. To annul and dissolve the marriage, they turn to Toros (Karren Karagulian), a local priest who watches over the family’s affairs in America and their often-troublesome, overspending, video-game-playing, headache-causing son. His helpers are Garnick (Vache Tovmasyan) and Igor (Yura Borisov), two clueless thugs tasked with getting Anora out of the family home. What they don’t know is that she’s got teeth, a fighting spirit, and more guts than any of them could handle.
Among writer-director Baker’s (and his producing partner and wife Samantha Quan’s) many gifts is an exquisite cast, and one wonders if Madison’s brief but memorable performance in “Once Upon A Time In Hollywood” is what allowed her to land the lead role here. As Anora, Madison, easily one of the best performers this year, is simply a force of nature like you’d remember from Quentin Tarantino’s film: angry, fiery, fierce and tough as nails. Yet she has a layer of vulnerability here as well, something she manages to hide from most people. But not from us, and certainly not from Igor. Entering Anora’s home like a tugboat-for-hire at first via a stunning real-time home invasion, as funny as it is impeccably choreographed, Igor gradually notices something fragile in Anora. She may miss what he’s seeing, but being the wise filmmaker that he is, Baker makes sure that we all see what he’s seeing (and more importantly, that he is watching it).
That undercurrent of observation drives much of the film’s stormy thrills via chases through the wintry streets of Brooklyn and Manhattan at night, captured gorgeously on film, with restrained but textured tones by cinematographer Drew Daniels. Thanks to his attentive lensing, some of the city’s less glamorous corners, as Toros and his crew look for ways to invalidate Ivan and Ani’s marital bliss, quickly take on a lived-in quality: You’ll recognize this New York from the city’s 1970s cinematic history even if you’ve never been to New York before.
And as for that marital bliss… it’s no wonder it’s never been all that real, not when your partner in crime is someone as wealthy and unreliable as Ivan. Baker’s films are often about class, and that sensibility is everywhere in “Anora” when it becomes clear that Ani’s ostensible enemies are basically her spiritual relatives: workers who are being dumped on and exploited by Ivan’s family. An alliance is quietly formed before our eyes, whether the people in it are aware of it or not. And it’s genuinely moving to witness that silent solidarity.
“Anora” is simultaneously thrilling and heartbreaking, boisterous and heartbreakingly sad. But rest assured, none of the people you come to care about in this miracle of a movie will be left without a shred of hope, even after an ending that comes like a punch in the gut. Having filled their lives with such tenderness and well-researched detail, Baker cares about them as much as he does. It’s the humanitarian in him.
This review was presented at the Toronto International Film Festival. It premieres on September 27.