Anora review: Chaotic, hilarious fairytale sees sex-worker caught in a bad romance
Mikey Maddison shines in Sean Baker’s loveless love story turned comedy manhunt.
Writer and Director Sean Baker’s (Florida Project, Red Rocket) Anora is relentless.
It’s two hours of opulence, verbal sparring and outrageous humour which is a deeply entertaining and, at times, uncomfortable viewing experience. But Anora is far from just a popcorn movie. The depth with which Baker constructs his characters, combined with a superb central performance and thought-provoking final scene, turn the film into a fascinating piece of cinema.
Twenty-one year old Ivan Zakharov (Mark Eidelshtein), the son of a Russian oligarch, is not the typical client at the upmarket Brooklyn strip-club where Anora (Mikey Madison, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Scream) works. As the only employee capable of speaking passable Russian, Anora, who goes by Ani, is soon summoned to meet the enthusiastic man-child. This marks the start of an unusual relationship between the two - in exchange for $15,000, Ani agrees to be Ivan’s girlfriend for the week, offering both companionship and “special sex”. A whirlwind week of sex, drugs, and Russian hip hop culminates in a fairytale ending of sorts: a shotgun Vegas wedding, a ring with a tennis-ball sized diamond and coat made of Russian sable (much more expensive than mink, Ani is keen to point out). But the illusion is soon shattered when Ivan’s billionaire parents threaten to visit, causing Ani’s new husband to panic and flee the house.
Anora is really two stories welded together.
The first is a rom-com without any genuine rom. Ani is infatuated with Ivan’s deep pockets more than his personality, which seems to have stopped developing when he was ten years old. He chases instant gratification, whether it’s sex or hopping on a private jet to fly to a city with higher quality drugs. He plays video games all day and his favourite haunt is a sweet shop run by a geriatric owner. For Ani, Ivan represents an opportunity to escape the daily struggle for survival. No more asking seedy looking men if they want a dance, or gently persuading them to accompany her to the ATM. Instead, it’s one long party, with some beautifully shot scenes of bright lights and thumping baselines.
When Ivan goes AWOL, Anora turns into a fully-fledged comedy as it becomes a farcical chase through nighttime New York.
This change in tone is sparked by the arrival of the enforcers hired by Ivan’s father. Like a pair of hapless cartoon villains, Igor (Yuriy Borisov) and Garnick (Vache Tovmasyan) contrive to get beaten up by someone half their size, all while their boss Toros (Karren Karagulian) harshly appraises their performance over speakerphone. Baker makes excellent use of some ever-green comedy formulas: an incompetent goon flanked by even more useless henchmen, an unlikely group of allies forced to work together, the odd language-barrier misunderstanding. While some of the humour may be bordering on absurd, it never comes at the expense of character development.
Toros, Garnick and most of all Igor are far more than simply comic relief. In fact, the film’s greatest strength comes in the way it builds and re-shapes the relationships between its cast of increasingly exhausted, desperate characters. These interactions are used to set up a striking comparison in people’s attitudes towards Ivan, the perennial prodigal son, and the downtrodden Igor, who is in many ways his antithesis. It is this contrast that forms the foundation of a powerful final scene, an intentionally uncomfortable couple of minutes that the audience neither expects nor particularly wants. As the credits roll in eerie silence, Baker forces us to sit in the dark and re-evaluate the last two hours of outrageous action, and the lasting impact it had on the characters, from a different perspective.
Anora is now showing at the Phoenix Picturehouse, the Curzon, the George Street Odeon and the Vue.