It’s rare that a film has an audience kicking their feet and giggling like a group of schoolgirls for two hours, only to end with the entire room sat deathly still, in complete silence, tear-streaked and contemplative.
But that’s Sean Baker for you. The latest project from the American filmmaker, whose previous credits include The Florida Project, Red Rocket and Tangerine, is hardly unfamiliar territory.
Baker has a penchant for following the lives of sex workers and other marginalised groups. But it is undeniably on track to become Baker’s biggest, most commercially lucrative, and critically acclaimed film yet. It already secured the Palme d’Or award at Cannes this year, with the box office hopefully waiting to follow suit.
Anora follows the exploits of a Russian-American stripper working in New York and living in Brooklyn who is played — to perfection — by newcomer Mikey Madison. Before Anora, Madison’s credits are thin: she had a small role in Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood in 2019, and fronted the 2022 Scream film reboot. Anora is essentially her big break, and boy does she nail it.
We meet Ani, as she likes to be called, when she’s just going about a regular working day at the club. Asking men if they want dances, vaping, gossiping about the weirder dudes’ behaviour with her work friends.
Ani is interrupted while eating her tupperware lunch by her boss, who says a big spender has come into the club looking for a dancer who speaks Russian. Recalling a bit of Russian from her grandmother, she obliges, and is quickly charmed by Ivan (Mark Eidelstein), a young man with broken English and a seemingly endless supply of cash.
He makes a deal with Ani to date her exclusively, for a fee, which quickly sets into motion a chain of events that whoosh by in a dizzying, dazzling montage. Sex, drugs, stripteases, sex, video games, private jet flights, trips to Vegas, sex. Life is like a music video for Anora (and for her audience) until a spontaneous wedding in Nevada leads Ivan’s oligarch parents to get involved. Suddenly, the hazy, hedonistic tone of the film sobers up.
But Anora barely ever loses its humour, something that might surprise viewers expecting a more gritty or depressing watch. The very first shot of the film shows a sequence of strippers performing lap dances in slow motion, set to a Robin Schulz (read: strip club appropriate) remix of Greatest Day by Take That, which landed especially well with the British audience.
Its ability to toe the line of funny and thoughtful is entirely dependent on Madison, who gives such an overwhelmingly good performance you start to think her IMDb page must be missing a few hundred entries. With Anora, she will place herself among the likes of Sydney Sweeney and Florence Pugh in her ability to draw in audiences to focus solely on her and her alone.
Madison and Eidelstein’s interactions are hilarious from the moment they meet, making excellent use of the language barrier, strange Runglish (the Russian equivalent of Spanglish) speaking patterns and Ivan’s dumb, rich naivety. Edelstein’s been called “the Russian Timothée Chalamet” for his looks and floppy, gangly physicality, which he uses impeccably for laughs. This includes a moment when he skids across the marble floor of his massive home to greet Ani, Risky Business-esque in his keenness (not that he’d know any movie released pre-2003).
But the humour peaks when Ani is accosted by Igor, Garnick and Toros, three of the men assigned to make sure Ivan behaves himself — and doesn’t marry any strippers — while living in New York. Ivan flees, and Ani is left to defend herself against these men, establishing a crossroads where everything could suddenly get very dark. Instead, it only gets funnier. She fights, bites and screams “rape” so many times she is gagged by a scarf (all hilarious on screen, even if it doesn’t sound so written down).
While the trailer may play up the heady, fun period of Ivan and Anora’s meeting, the sober portion of the film is by far the strongest and most enchanting. With Ivan missing, Ani and the oligarch’s goons form a rag-tag crew on the hunt to find him, stomping the bitterly cold streets of Brooklyn and New York, smoking cigarettes, smashing up sweet shops and getting their car towed. It almost becomes an ensemble comedy, with a tenderness and romance nestled in its midst.
But Anora’s true core is sadder and more painfully hopeful, shown in flashes of subtext and ever so slight wavering expressions from Madison. The final five minutes of screen time switches the tone entirely and leaves a strange, pensive mark on viewers, in a way where otherwise it might be misremembered as a hoot, and only a hoot.
Luckily, it is also a hoot. But one you’ll come away with struggling to get out of your head. You’ll miss Anora like an old friend. The only solution is to go back and see her again, which I will certainly be doing at the first opportunity.
