In more than one sense of the word, Anora is a hustler. In the early scenes of Sean Baker’s film that shares her name — a name she notably prefers not to be called (she goes by Ani) — viewers observe her hard at work dancing at HQ, a high-end New York strip club. She is extremely good at charming every last buck out of her customers’ wallets. When one prospective client protests that he doesn’t have any cash, she cheerfully takes him by the arm and leads him to the club’s ATM. His objections quickly cease.
One evening, a wealthy kid — he later says he is 21, although he acts younger — comes to HQ looking for a dancer who speaks Russian. Ani (Mikey Madison), fits the bill. Her Russian grandmother never learned English, and although she is embarrassed by her accent, she can both speak and understand the language.
The boy, Vanya (Mark Eydelshteyn), turns out to be the spoiled son of an obscenely wealthy Russian businessman. Funny, carefree, and, most importantly, in possession of a bottomless bank account, he is an ideal mark for someone like Ani. It means nothing to Vanya to invite her to his Brooklyn mansion and to pay her for sex, or to acquiesce when she raises her rates on New Year’s Eve because it’s a holiday. When Vanya offers Ani $10,000 to spend the week with him and she counters with a demand for $15,000, he gladly agrees without a moment’s hesitation.
READ MORE: 15 Movies You Didn’t Know Where Remakes
Through a lot of these early scenes, Anora plays like a more honest, more explicit version of Garry Marshall’s iconic ’90s rom-com Pretty Woman. They share most of the same main characters and plot beats: The wealthy out-of-town john, the broke sex worker, the chance encounter, the initial date, the offer of thousands of dollars for one week of companionship — potentially life-changing money for women like Ani or Julia Roberts’ Vivian in Pretty Woman. Ani spends so much time with Vanya, and so enjoys his luxurious lifestyle, that she begins to fall for him. So when Vanya spontaneously proposes marriage during a whirlwind weekend getaway to Las Vegas, Ani agrees and runs with him to a 24-hour chapel.
Baker has said in interviews he didn’t recognize the parallels between his film and Pretty Woman “until halfway through production.” Ironically, it’s around halfway through Anora that the film begins to diverge quite dramatically from the Pretty Woman template. That’s also when Baker really begins to lean into the sensitive touch he’s brought to his earlier projects like Tangerine and The Florida Project, which shared a similar interest in the everyday lives of sex workers.
Ani’s wedding is no fairy tale happy ending; her story is just getting started. It turns out Vanya’s family isn’t just rich. Back in Russia, they’re famous, not to mention fanatically protective of their reputation. Their wayward son marrying an American stripper simply won’t do. So Vanya’s parents back in Russia dispatch a trio of goons to confront the young couple: The bumbling, exasperated Toros (Karren Karagulian), who’s been cleaning up Vanya’s messes for years, his imposing brother Garnick (Vache Tovmasyan), and Igor (Yura Borisov), whose sad eyes suggest he might be more than mindless hired muscle.
Baker boldly and effectively mixes tones in these scenes. As the threats against Ani increase, so does Anora’s quotient of absurd comedy. In an early scene, Ani confesses a love of Disney princesses and Cinderella in particular, but she’s no damsel in distress waiting for a prince to fly to her rescue. When Toros and company show up at Vanya’s house looking to intimidate her into an annulment, she fights back — as in she literally kicks the crap out of them in scenes that verge on slapstick. (Forget the old stereotype about the hooker with the heart of gold; Ani’s a sex worker with balls of steel — with an appropriately fiery performance from Madison to match.)
Even as Baker uses these guys as droll punchlines, he also finds ways to bring all three men into clearer focus. None are simplistic thugs; especially not Igor, who is dangerous yet undeniably compelling. Borisov, an award-winning Russian actor, gives such a soulful performance in the role that he manages to stand out in a crowd of chatty characters even though he has less dialogue than everyone around him.
Anora arrives in theaters with loads of hype — it won the Palme d’Or at last spring’s Cannes Film Festival — and has been heralded as a breakthrough work by Baker, who not only wrote and directed the film, he also produced it, edited it, and even cast it. (Has any other major director ever been credited with the casting of their movies?) If Anora does well and enables Baker to keep making quirky films about the lives of richly-detailed working-class people, that’s great news. His is one of the truly unique voices in American film today.
That said, Anora felt to me less like a major step forward than a continuation of what he’s already been doing (sometimes in less conventional ways) for years. So much of Anora feels like it springs from an impulse to answer the question “What if Pretty Woman wasn’t a soppy, sanitized Cinderella story?” To be clear, Baker’s answer to that question turns out to be highly entertaining and loaded with terrific performances. If you enjoy it, and this is your first Sean Baker movie, I’d encourage you to seek out his earlier work as well.
Additional Thoughts:
-One visual touch I absolutely adored: The juxtaposition between Vanya’s glamorous mansion and Ani’s schlubby room in a tiny place she shares with a roommate. Baker found a house to serve as Ani’s home that sits beneath an elevated subway track, then captured his establishing shots of the location from street level so that the train rumbles by above it and makes her home look practically subterranean. Every time he does it, it subtly reinforces her status in the social order and makes Vanya’s free-spending lifestyle look even more appealing.
RATING: 8/10
12 Hit Movies That People Mistakenly Call Cult Films
Despite what people write about them, these movies were hits — they were not cult films.
