When Sean Baker won the Palme d’Or at Cannes for his new movie, Anora, he dedicated the award to "all sex workers, past, present and future." It was a fitting shout-out from a director who put transgender sex workers front and center in his buddy comedy Tangerine and cast Simon Rex as a scheming ex-porn star in Red Rocket.
In film after film, Baker has sought to portray sex work honestly, with none of the usual judgments or stigmas attached. But he’s also a master of comic chaos, and he loves telling stories about strivers and dreamers and putting them in situations that can blur the line between hilarious and harrowing.
Anora is easily one of Baker’s funniest works — and, by the end, one of the saddest. It’s a film of unflagging comic energy and roiling emotion, both courtesy of its star, Mikey Madison, best known for her chilling supporting roles in Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood and the fifth Scream movie. She gives a dazzling star turn here as Anora, or Ani, a 20-something exotic dancer at a high-priced Manhattan strip club.
Baker plunges us right into this world of neon lights and bared flesh, but his view of Ani and her fellow dancers at work is more humorous and detached than titillating. It’s a job, and Ani’s very good at it, as we can see when she staggers home, exhausted, to Brooklyn every morning to catch a few hours of shuteye.
Ani is flirty and disarming with her customers but no-nonsense with everyone else, especially the boss, Jimmy, who barges into the dressing room one day to announce, "I got a kid who wants someone who speaks Russian."
That kid who needs a Russian speaker is a young man named Ivan, played by a terrific Mark Eydelshteyn. Ani speaks a little Russian — she’s Uzbek American — and she and Ivan hit it off.
Before long, Ani is sleeping with him on the side for extra money, and judging by his parents’ waterfront mansion in Brighton Beach, Ivan definitely has some extra money. He’s the son of a Russian oligarch and leads a life of hard-partying, coke-snorting privilege.
Impetuous and immature, he whisks Ani off by private jet to Vegas, where they tie the knot. It’s a fairy-tale romance, until Ivan turns out to be more frog than prince.
Without going into too much detail, let’s just say that, back in New York, some men who work for Ivan’s father are none too pleased to hear that he’s wed, in their words, “a prostitute.” From there, Anora morphs from a delirious screwball comedy into a full-on action movie, starting with a nearly half-hour set-piece that deploys violence in ways both funny and unsettling.
Baker is playing with fire here, pushing the comic mayhem well past the point of comfort, and sometimes putting his characters, Ani included, in real danger. Yet you sense that Ani will make it through, and not just because of the grit and ferocity of Madison’s performance. Baker has zero interest in making a movie — and there have been too many — where a female sex worker becomes collateral damage.
When the cowardly Ivan flees and Ani and the other men set out to find him, Anora shifts again into a kind of madcap chase thriller, influenced by everything from Preston Sturges to the Three Stooges to Martin Scorsese’s classic New York nocturne After Hours. It’s a ragged and sometimes wearying experience, but it’s also furiously alive, and with a real feel for the cultural mix of Brighton Beach.
It’s great to see the Armenian American actor Karren Karagulian, one of Baker’s regular collaborators, pop up as one of the henchmen tailing Ivan. The Russian actor Yura Borisov packs some poignant surprises as a hired thug who’s kinder and more thoughtful than meets the eye. As for Madison, she makes Ani a richly complicated heroine: vulnerable, defiant, lovable and exasperating.
As frenetic as it is on the surface, Anora has an unmistakable moral undertow. This may be Baker’s latest story of a sex worker, but it’s also a tribute to workers in general. His sympathies are forever with those just trying to do their job, whether it’s the cleaners who show up early each morning to tidy up Ivan’s latest mess, or a harried tow-truck driver who nearly derails the plot.
Perhaps that’s why we feel so deeply for Ani. Even as everything around her falls apart, she’s too hard-working and tough-minded to be waylaid by self-pity. She may be chasing an impossible dream, but that’s what makes her one of the most vivid and memorable characters I’ve encountered this year.
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