"CATCH YOU FUCKERS AT A BAD TIME?"

Anora

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.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 18th, 2024 at 7:02 am and is filed under Reviews, Comedy/Laffs, Drama. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

17 Responses to “Anora”

  1. I’d love to get your take on Red Rocket, my favorite film of his by far.

  2. I’ve… accepted waiting for the inevitable ‘library dvd’ one this one after much deliberation. Initially, I was looking forward to it, as festival screenings reactions seemed ecstatic (even though I take those things with a few grains of salt). Of course, general release reactions were much more tepid (as always), but some trusted personal sources were downright frosty. However, I was willing to give it a shot, make up my own mind, all that good stuff.

    Somehow in my ignorance I completely missed it was from the autuer behind red rocker or whatever (which people were also ecstatic about) until I was in the theater lobby and saw it on the poster. So I chickened out and saw something else*. The best thing I can say about that particular picture show… Uh, it seemed scientifically calibrated towards a specific audience that I guess I’m not a part of.

    *I didn’t chicken out alone. The person I was going to see Anora with had coincidentally also accompanied me to red rocker, and she’s the one who noticed the poster. Upon doing so, she ran over, brought it to my attention, and asked “you’re seriously going to do this to me AGAIN??” So in all fairness, part of my chickenhearted avoidance was due to simple politeness. Had I gone alone, I may have still given it a shot, made up my own mind, all that good stuff.

  3. Something that I really loved that I haven’t seen many people discuss about this is the parallels between Ani and Igor. Ani is offended and outraged when people refer to her as a whore or a prostitute, which makes sense because it’s used to dehumanize her and delegitimize the relationship she’s trying to cling to, but she also definitely is a prostitute. Similarly she sees Igor as a brute and a bad guy because he’s a low level thug in this weird Russian world, but he clearly does not view himself that way. He’s offended and hurt that she doesn’t think he’s the nice guy he knows he is inside. They’re both a bit delusional, but also completely understandable. Of course Igor is more contemptible and she’s more sympathetic, but the humanity underneath both of their actions is very well realized. They seemed completely real to me. Baker’s writing is his strongest suit and also more subtle than you’d get from almost anyone else.
    I was a little less enamored of the Altman riff here than Baker’s more oddball stuff like Tangerine and Red Rocket but still liked it overall. Maybe watching California Split a couple weeks ago ended up being a bad idea because nobody can really do Altman as well as Altman.

  4. I saw the trailer for this and thought, “Nah, I’m good.” No disrespect, just clearly not for me, not in keeping with the cinematic journey I’m on. Then I got about halfway into this review and I thought, well, this actually doesn’t sound too bad. Not the first part, the romantic bullshit, but the Elmore Leonard comparison sounded promising. Then I got to the line about it working up to “a stress level heading toward GOOD TIME or UNCUT GEMS” and I knew I was right the first time. That’s a flavor of cinema I know better than to subject myself to.

    My whole life, I’ve talked to people who can’t handle any type of horror or gore or what-have-you, who just find the experience of viewing that kind of stuff uncomfortable and unpleasant, and they can’t imagine why anyone would want to do that to themselves. I’d always compare it to spicy food. There’s a certain amount of inherent discomfort that is part of the pleasure for people who enjoy it. We’re all feeling the same pain in our mouths, but some of us like that sensation. It took me a good 40 years to find the spice my tastebuds just don’t know how to find palatable, and it’s this new stressful cinema they got now. I don’t understand how it’s even possible to enjoy this shit. Ain’t life stressful enough? Of course, those horror-haters would have asked me the same thing. So I got more sympathy for them now that they’ve invented entirely new ways to make watching a movie feel like chewing on broken glass. That’s why they got menus, so we don’t all have to eat the same thing.

  5. Yeah, I’m the opposite, “a stress level heading toward GOOD TIME or UNCUT GEMS” is a glowing endorsement for me. For me, the appeal is pretty simple — if I’m stressed out, then I’m highly engaged, I’m definitely not bored. And sure, ‘stressed’ is ostensibly a negative feeling, but so is ‘sad’ and so is ‘scared’ (like you said) and people go to movies seeking those feelings out too. Looking forward to this one.

  6. I should probably watch these Baker movies anyway, because it sounds like there’s something in between the lines about his movies that finds the humanity in these people’s lives and has something to say about it that might resonate… but man this and Florida Project sound like spending a couple hours with people I would not wish to spend one moment with in real life. Rich Russian assholes and their worthless gamer kids, poor lazy strippers who neglect their children, and the kind of trash people who inhabit both of those ecosystems. It feels like being stuck in line in a 7/11 late at night while the clerk has to call the cops on either a drunk entitled rich kid or a methed out hooker causing the same kind of performative scene. Having been the clerk in that scenario too many nights, I have more knee jerk annoyance at the idea of spending MORE time in the presence of these people than I do open minded consideration for a story that features them. Even the poor foul mouthed but plucky stripper in Anora- it’s like, nah, you were ok buying into this nonsense with this dumbass kid, I lose a lot if not all sympathy for the character.

    But then, I saw KIDS and liked it, but at least there you have Chloe Sevingy to be a perspective character, and not just Willem Dafoe playing hall monitor and looking out for narratively-doomed children. I liked Good Time and Uncut Gems even though (nearly) all the characters in those movies I find to be equally unlikeable, but then, I’m not actually hoping for a happy ending for Adam Sandler or RPattz the same way you inherently want a happy ending for a child growing up in poverty. So it’s not as annoying to see a story about bad things happening to bad people when you don’t have to root for them to overcome the challenges the same way, and the prospect of watching them finally met accountability for their actions is ever-present. I practically cheered at the end of Uncut Gems. Maybe that’s the difference, for me.

  7. Inspector Hammer Boudreaux

    November 18th, 2024 at 1:27 pm

    I second wanting a review of RED ROCKET from Vern. The humor there hit me harder than Anora for whatever reason, and it pushes an unlikeable, total shitbird protagonist about as hard as an movie ever has without becoming an unwatchable movie itself. From my own experience, Sean Baker is batting 5 for 5.

  8. Inspector Hammer Boudreaux

    November 18th, 2024 at 1:40 pm

    Also, before I learned of this, I was afraid that Mikey Madison was going to be the girl who gets beat up and set on fire in all her movies. She’s a good actress and I suspect a fine person, but there is something about her that invites getting beat up and set on fire. I’m glad she escaped that trap, but it makes me think: maybe we need an actor that the moment they appear, you know they will get beaten up and set on fire. So the instant you see them you know that’s going to happen and wonder how. In old Turkish movies there’s this character/actor called Rapist Coşkun, he only showed up in movies to rape someone. What a way to make a living.

  9. Majestyk, I hear you on stressful cinema. As much as I want to like “Planes, Trains, and Automobiles,” travel already stresses me out so to have two guys having the worst travel experience just gives me hives. I don’t find the ratcheting up funny. Similarly, in “Meet the Parents” I just kept thinking “Just leave. Just go home and meet everyone at a different time.” Each new humiliation stresses me out and makes me wonder why the characters behave in this way.

  10. I should clarify, for the sake of accuracy, that it does not *reach* the stress level of GOOD TIME or UNCUT GEMS. But there’s more running around New York and yelling over each other than in most movies.

  11. I see some reactions here about people dreading watching this and… I dunno, maybe we’re all old. I saw the trailer for this and it looked like two and a half hours of, “Fuck you!” “No, fuck you, you fuckin’ fuck!” So I saw it based on the buzz, but not based in any desire. And yeah, my main problem is that these are people I really don’t like.

    I’ve gone back and forth on Baker. I really liked “Starlet”, which felt like a modest and fairly-controlled story of a young sex worker. I was riveted by the sadness and sense-of-place in “The Florida Project” and kept finding myself leaning in to Simon Rex’s dirtbag jerk in “Red Rocket”, the latter maybe being Baker’s funniest. But I thought everyone in “Tangerine” was repellent (which made me feel bad given the primarily-LGBTQ cast) and now “Anora” I never got the sense there was anything further than skin-deep about Ani and her lover, that idiot Russian oligarch failson. I think you really could have shaved off a half hour and still had, essentially, the same movie. They just don’t feel like interesting fuck-ups in “Anora”. And I’ve read the comparisons to “Pretty Woman” and, “Pretty Woman” is not my favorite movie, but have you guys even SEEN “Pretty Woman”? They are not the same movie by a longshot.

    I wish I could be more articulate about this. But so far, Baker’s movies could have ended with a man in a suit holding a bloody knife and a rumbling voiceover going, “It was capitalism all along!” In this respect, “Anora” has maybe the strongest ending of the Baker movies. But it would be nice to see him try something new.

  12. It is definitely getting old because I caught saw the trailer for this and it has what I call the Challengers effect on me which is even though these are probably good to great films man I just don’t think I could stand sitting though them. Especially watching a 20 something Russian billionaire gamer even though visually it looks fantastic. Just bad timing for me watching Russian billionaires with little to no judgment from the director. And I really liked The Florida Project
    with its very specific world and the realistic characters. But it also had a career best performance by Defoe who had a made a career of best performances playing so against type (since maybe Platoon?) that it’s going to draw me in just for that alone. I guess to compare in the 90’s there was a reason why my dad would not have been interested in seeing Singles or Greg Araki movies! I guess what I’m saying is is that we are turning into our parents. :)

  13. I see some reactions here about people dreading watching this and… I dunno, maybe we’re all old.

    To be fair to myself, rather than fear of the youf, my dread was based solely on being down this particular road before with red rocket (I apologize for referring to it as red rockER, earlier. I have way too much respect for Sammy Hagar to unfairly associate him with that), and the whole ‘fool me once…’ thing.

    I will eventually see it/give it an even break. Perhaps the guy recognized his own smugness and will do better next time, weirder things have happened. But I don’t want to spent $15 to find out. Nor lead someone else into a pit of smug snakes again, just to satiate my own morbid curiosity.

  14. @Crudnasty – you should probably give FLORIDA PROJECT a try, since the main characters are the kids, and they’re really great company (which makes the movie all that more heartbreaking.) And, yeah, Willem Dafoe. If you liked KIDS, I’d say there’s a fair chance you’ll like it too.

    RED ROCKET is a much harder sell. It’s kind of incredible and if nothing else it’s got one of the most fearless acting performances I’ve seen in a long time. But it made me grimace at least as much as it made me laugh; The whole thing is deeply, deeply unpleasant, and I completely get where Jojo is coming from. My wife absolutely despised it, and I don’t think she really believed me when I told her it’s from the same person that made FLORIDA PROJECT.

  15. Finally caught up with this and totally agree. I’d heard it loses steam after the first 45 min but that was actually my favorite part when the gangsters were totally overwhelmed by her. Speaking of formula, those would usually be the cool slick criminals but they weren’t the bumbling Fargo kind either. Just like oh shit he got married what the fuck are we supposed to do about this?

    Still need to see Red Rocket…

  16. I was trying to be a little vague about it in the review but I like that I assumed they were gangsters who were trying to be nice, but in the end we don’t really know if their job ever entails violence (though Igor seemed pretty adept at smashing counters). I like that it plays off of our experience with stories about criminals to add tension.

  17. Oh yeah, I just assumed they were so I’ve made an ass out of U and me.

Leave a Reply





XHTML: You can use: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>