Fairy Dust
Mikey Madison is the Cinderella that only Sean Baker could create.
Anora
Director: Sean Baker • Writer: Sean Baker
Starring: Mikey Madison, Mark Eydelshteyn, Karren Karagulian, Yura Borisov
USA • 2hrs 19mins
Opens Hong Kong Oct 31 • III
Grade: A
In the first act of this year’s Palme d’Or-winner Anora, Anora (Mikey Madison), or Ani as she prefers, could well be at the centre of a workplace comedy. In typical Sean Baker fashion he’s respectful of those living in the margins and their unconventional career paths, and Ani’s job as a sex worker is just that: A job. When we meet the almost indefatigable Ani she’s winding among the tables of HQ, the Manhattan strip club she works at, playing the crowd and honing her sales pitch. She jokes and flirts, up-sells for some extra scratch, hangs out with the girls she likes, bitches at the ones she doesn’t, and advocates for better working conditions for all of them. Stocks, shoes, her ass… sales are sales and labour deserves to earn a living.
Anora has been described both as an urban, 21st century Cinderella story and as a rom-com. To a degree both are correct. But this is Sean Baker, the mind behind Tangerine, The Florida Project and Red Rocket, and so Ani is a sweet, sensitive, tough, prickly, hopeful, naïve and realistic young woman navigating the margins of polite society, hiding in plain sight and still hoping for a fairy tale ending. Her prince charming is Vanya Zakharov (Timothée Chalamet-lite), a Russian rich kid and their wacky, inevitable, opposites attract love story is the kind that could only happen under late-stage capitalism.
Not built to last
We meet Ani at work on the night she meets Vanya, thanks to her manager setting her up with the VIP because she speaks a little Russian, having grown up in Brighton Beach. Vanya is a goofy, gangly, entitled 21-year-old who’s obsessed with video games and weed. He’s taken with Ani, and so he invites her over to his father’s sprawling mansion, first for a night then for a week of parties and sex, all well paid. When he suddenly proposes marriage, she initially brushes him off as full of shit, but then lets herself believe the Pretty Woman fantasy. For the record, Pretty Woman wishes it was this funny, this charming, or this observant.
The first act is a stylish whirlwind, shot in vivid neon by DOP Drew Daniels, in which Vanya wines and dines Ani, sweeping her off her feet and whisking her off to Las Vegas for a Little White Wedding Chapel marriage. Back in New York they set up house and Ani’s dreams seem to have come true. She quits the strip club to the cheers of the girls left behind. It’s all nimble charm and fist-pumping You Go Gurl energy and even though she has a foul mouth it’s hard not to root for Ani. Needless to say, the house of cards starts to collapse when Vanya’s power oligarch parents Nikolai (Aleksei Serebryakov, Nobody) and Galina (Darya Ekamasova, The Americans) get wind of his activities and send his godfather Toros (brilliant Baker regular Karren Karagulian) to clear up this nonsense before they get in from Moscow. The comedy that comes from Toros trying to get Vanya’s marriage annulled makes up Act II.
Make no mistake. Anora is funny, and frequently hilarious, especially a kidnapping scene when Toros comes to collect Vanya and winds up tussling with the ultra-feisty Ani. Not even his his muscle, Garnik (Armenian comedian Vache Tovmasyan) and Igor (scene-stealer Yura Borisov) are able to deal with “Vanya’s wife”. Nikolai’s delight at her parting shots at Galina, the long night looking for Vanya in Manhattan’s least shiny corners (even if the sequence gives off major Uncut Gems vibes), the family lawyer’s bafflement at discovering the couple was married in Nevada, and Igor’s stoic solidarity are among the dozens of throwaway details that give Anora its engrossing texture. But Baker’s script is laced with increasing levels of tension, and we know this fairy tale can’t end with happily ever after because the world is the way it is. Women like Ani – people really, because Igor is as stuck as she is – are the working-class cannon fodder that get fed to the system guys like Zakharov benefit from.
None of this works without Madison’s (Scream, Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood) incredible, all-in, star-making turn as Ani, whose tragedy isn’t in her job as a sex worker but in the fact she lets herself fall for the fantasy; she foolishly buys into the American Dream circa 2024. She’s one of the great characters of the year: bold and quick with a jaded “Fuck you,” but heartbreakingly vulnerable when she admits, even to herself, that she harbours very basic desires for happiness. Anora is original filmmaking for grown-ups, where sex is in service of the story, ordinary people are at the heart of compelling stories and true happy endings are a rare thing. Unless you pay for them.