ANORA is a real knock out of a movie from writer/director Sean Baker, major indie voice of the 21st century known for style on a microbudget, authentic performances by non-professional actors, and being one of the first to shoot an acclaimed movie on an iPhone. I’ll be honest, I’ve only seen THE FLORIDA PROJECT, which I loved at the time, but for some reason haven’t caught up or kept up with the rest of his filmography. So correct me if I’m wrong, but my impression from that limited view is that this is him doing something a little more slick and mainstream than usual without abandoning what he’s good at.

Not that it’s 100% commercial or normal. It just feels that way. It’s pretty long, it’s about a sex worker, and it’s a somewhat odd combination of genres, but it’s really funny, it’s not super weird, and it has heart. It won the Palme d’Or, but I think it could pass as a fun movie for normal people better than recent winners PARASITE, TITANE, TRIANGLE OF SADNESS or ANATOMY OF A FALL.

Mikey Madison, who was great as one of Pamela Adlon’s daughters on Better Things before being set on fire in ONCE UPON A TIME …IN HOLLYWOOD and SCREAM (2022), plays the title character. But she always corrects people that she wants to be called “Ani,” so that’s what I’ll call her. She’s a lovably foul-mouthed, take-no-shit dancer at a high end Manhattan strip club called HQ. We see her on the job finding customers to bring back into different levels of VIP for lap dances. She makes conversation, makes people comfortable, we see her taking a smoke break with her co-worker Lulu (Luna Sofía Miranda), laughing about weird shit that has happened during the shift. Mostly it seems like a job, and one she’s good at.

One day she gets dragged over to a particular client the management wants to impress, a young Russian guy they call Vanya (Mark Eydelshteyn) who asked for a dancer who speaks Russian. Ani comes from a Russian family and does understand it, but doesn’t like to speak it because of her Brooklyn accent. She makes him laugh like a drunk dork and he gets her number to hire her for that other gig she sometimes does on the side, outside of the club.

Vanya seems younger and less mature than her, and their living situations couldn’t be more different. Ani commutes from an apartment in Brighton Beach shared with a roommate who hates her guts (Ella Rubin, THE IDEA OF YOU). Vanya, it seems, lives in a mansion with a guard at the gate and shit. Laying around after some paid sex, Vanya jokes about where his money comes from, then admits that his dad is Nikolai Zakharov (Aleksei Serebryakov, NOBODY). He has her Google it, and waits for her to gasp.

This kid is a total goofball, always giggling, playing video games, taking hits off his fancy pipe, and orgasming so fast it cracks her up. But she thinks he’s cute and sweet, brings Lulu to one of his parties, ultimately agrees to take time off from work when he offers $15,000 to pretend to be his girlfriend for a week, which entails not only sex but lots of fun debauchery with friends, and even turns into a spontaneous private jet flight to Vegas.

For a while it’s a fantasy – what if you had all this money, didn’t have to go to work, just get to hang out in this mansion, take a vacation, have fun with friends, drink constantly, dance, shop, dress up, laugh, have lots of sex, also drugs and gambling and video games if you’re into that. They’re having so much fun. But I think this is the first part of the movie that I would describe as strategically exhausting. It’s just scene after scene of partying, the editing starts to get more and more rapid, but it just keeps going and going. The characters are still enjoying themselves, the movie seems to be enjoying itself, but it starts to feel gross, it’s too much. Okay, maybe this isn’t the best life. Very effective.

It’s kind of a rom-com, so when the week is about to end, they make a spontaneous decision to get married. Yes, it’s so he won’t have to go back to Russia, but she’ll only do it if he swears he really loves her. The big shift is when they get home and word of the marriage spreads to the adults who were supposed to be watching him. His godfather Toros (Karren Karagulian, TANGERINE) sends his henchman Garnick (Vache Tovmasyan), who brings along another guy named Igor (Yura Borisov) for backup. They force their way through the door, demand an annulment and threaten to bring Vanya back to Russia to work for his parents, so he makes a run for it.

Suddenly we have a totally different movie where these strangers to Ani are trying to tie her up and she fights back not only physically but with torrents of foul-mouthed vengeance. They are thoroughly unprepared to deal with her and both the lip she gives them and their frequent apologies and sincerity about not wanting to do this are extremely funny. But, the longer the fight goes on the more tense it gets, in part because we’re left in the dark about what exactly the family business is and what these guys do for it. And we’re very aware of the possibility that light-heartedness could just be a trick to set us up for a gut punch.

They force Ani to in theory agree to the annulment (offering to pay her for it) and together they drive around trying to find Vanya to make it happen, but he seems to have gone on a bender. So basically it starts as a fun rom-com/party movie, then it shifts to a bit of an Elmore Leonard inept criminals type of story (with both the humor and the tension that creates), then slides into a chase across town that has a stress level heading toward GOOD TIME or UNCUT GEMS. A unique mixture of ingredients.

I like when minor characters in a movie seem so believable I figure they might be non-actors, but sometimes I guess wrong. I was convinced that the divorce center clerk was real, but no, Mickey O’Hagan is an actor with a bunch of credits, even a bit part in DESTROYER. But the part where they’re frolicking around the Fremont District telling people they just got married – I’m pretty sure they just shot that on the street. We got that at least.

It was definitely not shot on an iPhone, but instead on 35mm by cinematographer Drew Daniels (Euphoria, WAVES, Swarm). A very modern look, but not digital.

There’s an obvious thematic comparison to be made to PRETTY WOMAN, but it subverts some of the romance formula, without getting too grim. A couple tropes it upends (SPOILERS): If it followed the formula, Vanya would realize he fucked up and do something to redeem himself. Here he’s just a shitty, immature brat. In the formula Igor might be the guy who’s there all along who she ultimately realizes is better for her. Here it’s more complicated because she won’t forgive him for tying her up and then when she does make a gesture toward him it seems like an unhealthy decision done for the wrong reasons. He even seems to sense that.

It makes a point of being completely non-judgmental about sex workers. Even the first MAGIC MIKE had to be about drug addiction, but this movie has no interest in lecturing or cautionary-taling. Often even in a sympathetic portrait you would see that she was abused or had some kind of bad family life, which would not be unrealistic. But here, when Vanya asks about meeting her family, she’s open to it, she does seem to have a relationship with her mom and brother, doesn’t say anything bad about them. That’s a refreshing surprise. Still, there’s a moment Ani’s tough outer layer finally cracks, and there are certainly unsaid things we can read into where she’s coming from.

Madison’s performance is a tour-de-force, she’s like a hurricane at the middle of the thing, with Eydelshteyn offering note perfect support as a 100% believable doofus. But it’s also populated with great smaller characters. It’s hilarious to see Ani butt heads with Vanya’s horror show of a mom Galina (Darya Ekamasova). Even her husband finds it amusing. And I laughed every time we saw Diamond (Lindsey Normington), a dancer at HQ who despises Ani, is always giving her dirty looks and scheming against her. It’s especially funny because she might be an absolute bitch or she might be completely justified, we really don’t know. But Ani is our friend so we side with her.

On the nicer side I really like the minor role of the bouncer Dawn (Brittney Rodriguez, RED ROCKET), who always acts annoyed with Ani but gets sad when she’s leaving, and the surprise MVP Igor. He’s always stealing scenes with the looks on his face as he fails to say what he wants to say to Ani (usually because she tells him to fuck off before he can finish a syllable). Then it gets more complicated.

It’s a sad movie, about messy people in a crazy situation. But I don’t know – I like people. Some of them. I like spending time with them, so it ends up feeling warm anyway. This stuck with me for days after seeing it. Definitely one of the year’s best.