RELEVANCY: ANORA (wri/dir by Sean Baker, with Mikey Madison, Neon, 139mns, 35mm, USA)

In some strange way, the question of relevancy in pop culture has been rendered irrelevant.

We live in beyond the looking glass times where concerted efforts appear to be made to make us all discouraged, confused, disheartened, disoriented in the surrealism of the current moment.

But, as always, even those factors have to be swept aside. Each individual in this world ultimately has the best chance at change through their own agency. 

We have to stop worrying about trying to save the world and just get to the act of doing what we can do. God willing, others, will do the same. And at some point, there will be a critical mass and change for the better will happen.

This is all a long worded way to say that moviemaker Sean Baker and his team have made a relevant, vital, vibrant movie in the 2024 Cannes Palm D'Or winning ANORA. A movie that really works (and succeeds) to get at some truth of our current moment. Team ANORA has done their part to continue the relevancy of cinema.

Not an homage, not a recreation, not a love letter to cinema of old (though paradoxically elements of all these things are in ANORA) but a living, breathing, unwieldy story of the obscenity of our current moment.

The story is one we've heard before. Anora or "Ani" as she prefers to be called is an erotic dancer/sex worker who happens to know/speak some Russian. This gets her paired with Vanya, son of Russian oligarchs, who shows up in Ani's strip club for a good time. They hit it off and soon Vanya is paying Ani to come to his mansion to be his "girlfriend" for a week in exchange for $15,000. Vanya loves to party hard and suddenly the pair are in Las Vegas getting married. When Vanya's parents catch wind of the union, they dispatch family fixer Toros, a beleaguered Armenian always cleaning up Vanya's messes. Toros brings Igor, quiet but effective working class Russian muscle, to annul the marriage and get Ani out of the picture.

This movie could be "Pretty Woman" for the 2020's except it's not. It also has some echoes of the Safdie brothers' brand of New York desperate journeys by desperate characters a la GOOD TIME and UNCUT GEMS. But ANORA is going for something ultimately distinct and different.

The movie is anchored by the go for broke performance of its lead Mikey Madison who commits to Ani's mix of fierceness, tenderness, naivete, and ambition. These traits will both protect and expose her throughout the movie. The supporting cast is also, uniformly excellent. 

As with all of Baker's movies since STARLET, and he has now made a kind of "Sex Worker" pentalogy (STARLET, TANGERINE, THE FLORIDA PROJECT, RED ROCKET, ANORA), ANORA focuses on the striving of a sex worker to better their working poor/working class life in a very specific locale: here the Brooklyn/New York City of the Russian enclave of Coney Island and its environs. 

Baker uses the artificial surfaces of Las Vegas to cinematically tip us off to the marriage itself…

ANORA is also a movie of distinct parts, acts, and tones. Act I is the rush and excitement of Ani's and Vanya's courtship and marriage. Act II is a hilarious single location sequence in Vanya's mansion's living room in which Vanya runs away from responsibility and Ani fights every single person who comes to try to fix the situation. Act III finds Ani and the fixers looking for Vanya. Act IV is the arrival of Vanya's parents to annul the marriage. And Act V . . .well. . .it's a beautiful, painful Act V and you should experience it.

Baker continues to push his moviemaking and its concerns. The explicit sex scenes which started to show up in RED ROCKET return here and are central/critical to the entire thesis of the movie. No recent moviemaker has done more to reclaim and reassert sexuality as crucial to adult moviemaking as Baker. These scenes are revealing, telling, funny, awkward, and deeply emotional. A feat most American cinema has never been able to pull off.

But of course one has to equally praise Madison who has to perform these scenes AND make them revelations of character/story development. It's all well and good for a writer/director to imagine such scenes. It's another thing entirely for the actors involved to make them work.

It dawns on Ani more and more that Vanya is exactly the spoiled boy he seemed to be all along…

ANORA is an exuberant, unwieldy comedy for much of its runtime. Like Baker's TANGERINE and RED ROCKET (FLORIDA PROJECT operated more as a kind of HUCKLEBERRY FINN for children of the working poor), we're laughing at the outrageousness of the story, characters but we're also simultaneously acknowledging the characters' truths.

More than the sexuality, the comedy, the "of the moment" music, pop culture, social media observations that pulsate through the movie, ANORA is the rarest of rare cinematic gems: an American movie about the truth, horror, obscenity of class divides.

We, Americans, have never fully figured out a way to talk about class (as we've never found a way to talk about death or sex). Maybe no culture really has found that way. But the growing divide between the haves and the have nots in our society is stark and clear. Vanya and his Russian oligarch parents represent a kind of spoiled entitlement the ultra-rich wield with little to no regard about how such options are totally absent from the lives of 99.999% of folks suffering in this world. More and more it seems like the wealthy and empowered don't care. Nor have respect for anyone who isn't them. And ANORA drives this point home with comedic but piercing clarity.

Hired “muscle” Igor seems to be the only one who truly realizes what an obscenity affluence can be…

The strange love-hate relationship that develops between Ani and Russian "muscle" Igor is the acknowledgement of two working class people who have never had it easy. Who have had to fight, claw, figure out a way to put food on their plate. Baker and his performers do a commendable job of maintaining suspense and tension and uncertainty in this relationship until the final frame. 

ANORA, like most great movies, isn't about one thing. Or about proving some kind of political or philosophical thesis. Life is way shaggier, stranger, more complex, more uncontrollable, undefinable. And it's that uncontainable vitality, like so much great cinema, that ANORA captures.

But ANORA does dare to take a look at the cancers and poisons of our current moment. If you didn't laugh, you'd cry. And mostly you do both.

Craig Hammill is the founder.programmer of Secret Movie Club