As the titular character in Sean Baker's Anora, Mikey Madison has a profound breakthrough in the role, a complicated and delicate character to inhabit.The Associated Press
Anora
Written and directed by Sean Baker
Starring Mikey Madison, Mark Eydelshteyn and Karren Karagulian
Classification N/A; 139 minutes
Opens in select theatres Oct. 25
Critic’s Pick
There are a few disparate threads that unite a Sean Baker film.
Ever since the American director broke out with 2012’s Starlet, Baker has used the backdrop of sex work to trace the sometimes quiet and distant, sometimes extremely loud and incredibly up-close lives of those trying to find their place within society’s margins. Typically, those journeys are embodied by either first-time performers (The Florida Project’s Bria Vinaite, Tangerine’s Kitana Kiki Rodriguez) or names who have been written off (Red Rocket’s Simon Rex), each actor finding themselves thrust into the awards-race spotlight after Baker tapped into their unbeknown and/or underutilized talents. Also: For reasons unknown, Baker really, truly, weirdly loves the saucy, faux-elegant Aguafina Script font, using it in every one of his films since 2015’s Tangerine. (One possible justification: it’s free through Google).
Pull all the threads together, though, and Baker reveals himself to be one of American cinema’s most successful practitioners of discovery. He finds and then elevates – some might argue exploits – the unique elements of this world that the rest of us cannot be bothered to see.
Anora, which opens in theatres this weekend after winning the Palme d’Or at Cannes this past spring, is a Baker film through and through. But in its relatively gigantic ambitions, nuanced texture, bifurcated structure, and ferocious performances, Anora is also a capstone for the director: a once-in-a-career triumph that exists on the back of everything else, the goodwill it generates impossible to divorce from the experiments and triumphs encountered along the way. Baker should feel a remarkable sense of exhausted achievement – which is only fitting as audiences will likely walk out of Anora feeling similarly out of breath and faint.
Spanning the champagne lounges of Manhattan’s strip clubs to the high-roller suites of Vegas – with a stopover in the global environs of the oligarch class – Anora supersizes the smaller worlds Baker is more familiar with to create something both intimate and towering. When the film opens, the twentysomething Anora – please, call her Ani – is a hustler who doesn’t seem to mind that she is not really fooling anyone, least of all herself. As played by Mikey Madison, Anora/Ani plays all-night games of seduction with drunk businessmen at a Manhattan strip club, collects her hard-earned cash, and then goes home to a room located right outside the train tracks, ready to collapse and start all over again in a few hours.
One night – and it typically only takes just one night – Ani’s life changes forever when she’s asked by her club’s manager to entertain Ivan (Mark Eydelshteyn), a cash-flashing cad who is looking for someone who he can flirt with in his native Russian tongue. Ani being an Uzbek-American who understands, but cannot exactly talk back, in Russian, takes the gig eagerly. Soon, Ivan – who has no shame in admitting he’s a brat living off the wealth of his Russian oligarch father – is entertaining Ani at his riverside mansion, promising her the world. A quick Vegas chapel marriage ensues, Ani walks away from the club as if escorted off the premises via pumpkin-carriage, and the two plan for a happily-ever-after.
This being reality – or Baker’s sometimes tilted-head version of reality – things go sour quickly. Ivan’s minders, a collection of rather ineffective goons led by the constantly flustered Toros (Karren Karagulian), get word of the elopement and set about convincing/threatening Ani to annul the proceedings, lest she suddenly be able to lay claim to Ivan’s fortune and risk ruin to the (good?) family name. And it is at this point, roughly one-third through the film, when Baker decides to swerve into territory that might feel unexpected had he not just come off the similarly wacky, high-stress antics of Red Rocket, which focused on the increasingly desperate schemes of a former porn star trying his best to escape small-town Texas hell.
Without spoiling Anora’s narrative pivot, it’s safe to say that Baker is not only building upon his tragi-comic chops but also injecting his cinematic sensibilities with a hot shot of Uncut Gems-esque anxiety. With Ivan and Ani now off on separate misadventures, Baker stages a tick-tock, solve-by-dawn scenario whose stakes are impossibly high for its most vulnerable players. The result is a ferociously loud, defiantly funny, and frequently tragic portrait of one woman’s struggle to hold onto the fantasy that she has created for herself.
And just as many of Baker’s former leads have discovered, it pays to play in his low-budget endurance tests. While hardly a newcomer – she was a regular on the FX series Better Things and popped up in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood alongside now-red-hot stars Sydney Sweeney and Margaret Qualley – Madison breaks through as Ani/Anora in a profound way. As sharp and dangerous as broken glass, but with the metaphorical shards also revealing a natural fragility, Anora is a complicated and delicate character to inhabit.
One false move and the heroine can slip into either cliché: the Pretty Woman hooker rescued from her own self-hatred, or the gold-digging opportunist in need of a reality check/cheque. Ani is none of those things, and Madison never loses grip on the character for a second. Together with Baker, the pair craft a whirlwind of a character, provocative and powerful and so very easy to imagine as the object of anyone’s obsession. All of which makes the film’s final few moments so polarizing. While a second viewing might tip my affections elsewhere, at this point, I’m on Baker’s side.
While no one in the cast could possibly match Madison, Baker sure gives his actors enough space to at least try. While Eydelshteyn comes close as the reigning king of useless nepo-babies, it is Karagulian who comes closest to stealing the show with grand-theft auto flair. As a loyal henchmen just trying his best to keep an entire empire from falling apart, the actor – a long-time collaborator of Baker’s – delivers a rough and ragged turn that combines danger and comedy in such an electric way that I couldn’t help but recall David Proval’s late-career breakthrough work on The Sopranos. You wouldn’t want to run into Toros on the street, but if you were up against a corner, he might be the first person you’d call, too.
Ever since Anora’s world premiere at Cannes – where Baker’s epic-length burst of indie-scrappy energy seemed to slap awake a crowd otherwise pelted with prestige misfires both big (Megalopolis, Kinds of Kindness) and small (Bird, Parthenope) – the film has been tipped as the one to beat at the 2025 Oscars. I’m not so confident that the Academy is ready to embrace Baker. But there’s no doubt Baker is ready to rule whatever world is made available to him.