Over the last decade American indie writer/director Sean Baker has crafted an acclaimed reputation for his social realist bittersweet dramas about working-class characters and their daily struggles for survival in the margins of hyper-capitalist modern America. In films such as The Florida Project and Red Rocket, Baker has created memorable real-life stories anchored by lived-in performances from both actors and non-professionals.
His latest, the much-lauded, Cannes Palme d’Or winning, and six-Oscar nominated Anora is both a continuation of many of his previous thematic interests and also an extension of them in its offering of a fast-paced, often very funny screwball dramedy reimagining of the Cinderella fairy-tale transposed to the present day, Russian-populated Brighton Beach neighbourhood of Brooklyn.
Mikey Madison, in an Oscar-nominated, heavy Brooklyn drawling and tenderly layered performance, stars as the title character, a 20-something sex worker who prefers to go by the name Ani and whose better-than-average Russian (picked up from an Uzbek grandmother) puts her on the lap of playboy strip-club patron, 20-something Vanya (Mark Eydelshteyn), who has seemingly endless amounts of money. Vanya is taken with Ani and offers her plenty of cash to come pay him a private off-site visit at the nouveau-riche mansion where he stays, for hanging out and sex.
An offer of more cash for a weeklong engagement follows and soon Ani is swept off into Vanya’s carefree world of lavish parties, private jet trips to Vegas and all the one-percenter perks that accrue to him as the spoilt son of a Russian oligarch. The not quite fairy-tale Vegas marriage between the two enamoured youngsters that follows is not the end of the story but rather its real beginning.
When Vanya’s parents, still in Russia, find out what their wayward spawn has done, they leap into action and dispatch their trusty Armenian American fixer, Toros (Karren Karagulian), to end the marriage. Interrupted at a baptism, Toros “hops to” and orders his goons — brash Armenian Garnick (Vache Tovmasyan) and quiet but tough Russian Igor (Yura Borisov, a popular Russian actor whose first major US performance here has earned him an Oscar nomination) to get to the mansion and keep the imbecilic couple there until he arrives.
Vanya, revealing the first signs of his true cowardly nature, does a runner, leaving Ani in the charge of the goons, who soon discover that she’s much more of a handful than they’d bargained for. By the time Toros gets there, everything has gone pear-shaped and all four members of this new highly dysfunctional, reluctant, alternative family unit, drawn together by their reliance on those at the top of the food chain, must embark on a madcap journey through the restaurants, clubs and hotspots of Brighton Beach and Coney Island to find Vanya and annul the marriage before his parents’ imminent and furious arrival in the morning.
By the time it’s all over, Anora will have realised that Vanya is not her prince charming and that life in the fabled clouds of the one percent isn’t all it's cracked up to be. She may also have found the possibility for a real, meaningful relationship, though the film’s uncomfortably sad, uncertain final moments leave plenty of room for doubt.
Baker’s previous films have always walked the line between fidelity to the often difficult environments their characters inhabit and the sharp moments of “you just have to laugh or else you’ll cry” humour that their struggles throw up. Anora, more consciously than any of his previous work, leans into the comedy elements of its narrative and creates an intentionally devised screwball series of unfortunate events for its very able actors to face, while never losing sight of who and where they are.
The whiplash smart dialogue and frenetic interactions between the characters keep everything moving briskly along, even if Baker’s loyalty to his working class poetry and social-realist roots sometimes means that the film wanders from its screwball plot for one or two unnecessary extra moments of real-life observation that ultimately add up to a total run-time of just over two hours, which could, arguably, have been shorter. That’s a small complaint against a film that, thanks to Baker’s strong feeling for his characters and their world, and the complex performances from Madison, Borisov and the rest of the cast, delivers rewardingly on both entertainment and touching, relatable human drama levels.
In the hyper-materialist world of our scattered-attention, digitally-obsessed, current-day reality, Anora reminds us that the real lesson of the fairy-tale we’ve all been taught is too impolite to mention: Cinderella was only in it for the Benjamins and her marriage to Prince Charming probably ended in an expensive divorce days after that “happily ever after” ending. That shouldn’t count against her, because we all have to do to get ahead is hate the game, not the player.
• Anora is on circuit.
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