People don’t often get their winning lottery ticket, but maybe that’s a good thing. Anora is the latest from writer/director Sean Baker, sort of a dark comedy about a rags to riches tale. The titular character (Mikey Madison) is a young, working-class stripper who lives a modest life with modest income. Her world starts to grow when she begins to service Ivan (Mark Eidelstein), a wealthy young man with the maturity of a 10-year-old. We can see where this is going. He’s a Russian rich kid, but the identity of his father and the family business is shrouded in mystery early on. Instead, the focus is on Ivan’s considerable riches and his coming of age by way of American excess. He lights up around Anora similarly to how a kid would look at their VC balance in a Playstation game. It’s through this transactional affair that his sexual awakening is expanded, but he seems ill-equipped to take on the emotional side of the relationship, unbeknownst to the also young and naive Anora.
The movie is about young people making choices that they don’t understand the gravity of. Ivan is 21, Anora is just 23, but the latter seems like an adult compared to the blase Ivan, who wants to spend the day alternating between playing video games and having sex with his “new toy.” Anora, by contrast, comes from a low-income background, with her and her sister seemingly able to only rely on each other. So Ivan’s attention opens up new possibilities for her, a way to access a level of fortune seemingly unimaginable. That is until she discovers why Ivan is in no rush to reveal their union to his parents.
Baker’s flick is like a mashup of Pretty Woman (1990) and Hustlers (2019), almost seeming like a direct response to the latter. While Hustlers attempted to see the power dynamic switch to the working class, here our protagonist is a sex worker who’s a bit in over her head about the world she just entered. She’s eager to dive face first into this environment, without knowing much of anything about it, and that will come back to haunt her. The performances are showy and charismatic, with Madison putting in an empathetic turn that plays up the character’s street smarts and bombastic attitude, but also with a layer of vulnerability when confronted with a level of power that supersedes her boldness. She’s quite quick to call out the BS from some of her adversaries, but she’s ultimately outnumbered and outresourced, and Madison sells the moments where Anora knows she can’t talk herself out of a situation, no matter how many obscenities she knows.
Eidelstein is the flip side of that coin, as a reckless idiot who never feels the need to mature or learn from the effects his actions have on others, as he won’t suffer any of those consequences. It’s in this turn that Eidelstein is able to communicate the unique boyhood that the character represents – he’s not grown up enough to be a man, but he has the bank account of a Fortune 500 CEO. Eidelstein plays this as if Tarzan was forced to interact with civilization but with a sex addiction. This combo of immaturity and freedom showcases a dichotomy between how Ivan and Anora each have to move through life. If nothing else, the film argues that Anora’s profession has done little to provide her true sexual freedom or autonomy in regard to how her relationship will take shape.
Baker sees this tale of morality and ethics take place through the exercise of a comedy of errors. When the young couple’s marriage is questioned, Anora gets to play off a series of bumbling dorks, whose allegiance to Ivan’s powerful family belies their cluelessness and buffoonery in the face of the film’s silver-tongued heroine. This includes some solid comedic turns from the likes of Yuriy Borisov and Karren Karagulien. They operate almost like the gangsters and mobsters they’ve seen in movies, but are trying to do so with a protagonist that is willing and able to utilize the gender politics of the present moment to protect herself. This makes their interactions at times controversial and difficult to watch, but Baker undercuts the tension with a dark sense of humor that also allows his actors to resolve a moment with clever one liners and outbursts of disdain.
Anora is a unique film for while it is well made and strongly acted, I can imagine audiences will vary on their reading of the movie’s themes, along with who we should empathize with and why. You could even make the argument that the title character is too embattled and that the obstacles and fate that the character is subjected to are at times mean-spirited. Which calls into question how much of this tale is an attempt to punish its lead character, or if the intent is purely that this is a cautionary tale that warns not everything that glitters is gold. Still, I think the film is ambiguous enough in its execution that the lessons people take from it will vary by the individual. It’s not a movie that tells you how to think, but it does show a litany of characters at their most callous and inhumane, so hopefully many will get the point on just who we should be rooting for and against here.
With that said, the film’s mature content is often liberating but also occasionally produces some vapid writing. There’s a couple of scenes and rants that just devolve into characters stringing the same couple of curse words together into increasingly simplistic speech. It’s almost as if it’s a parody of a flick with an unlimited F word count. However, it’s a minor criticism that only occasionally appears. The film’s tone is at times hopeful – while in other moments, it is cynical and cold. But the reading of this is a matter of perspective – once Anora begins to believe she’s found Prince Charming, the film is intentionally doused in a sheen of saccharine inauthenticity. Including a rather over the top soundtrack to further lampoon the happy moment. I imagine most audiences will pick up on this immediately, and if not, they’ll be in for a well-deserved surprise in the film’s final acts.
The film’s lasting impact is its depiction of the title character, who actually prefers to be called Annie. Anora is not the first film to put a lens to the lives of sex workers while examining how their profession makes their lives intrinsically complicated. Anora emerges as the lasting visage of that lens, showcasing a character who thinks she’s in control but is unfortunately at the mercy of a much more sinister system. She’s the embodiment of not winning the lottery, but what occurs when “winning” happens to you.
