‘Anora’ May Be the Movie of the Year

In every movie by American independent feature film director Sean Baker (2015’s Tangerine, 2017’s The Florida Project, 2021’s Red Rocket), there comes a moment that catches in your throat.

These scenes tend to come at the end of a blistering freight train that is the usual Baker narrative, a propulsive race that keeps audiences in a state of constantly trying to catch their breath. His films are among the few major features that consistently, compassionately and realistically portray the lives of marginalized people.

In Tangerine, it’s an instance of tenderness and solidarity as the two trans sex workers in the centre of the story come together in the face of violence and humiliation.

The Florida Project offers a similar moment of solidarity, this time between two small kids, who join hands and flee the adult world of bad decisions and awful compromise.

In Baker’s latest film, the Palme d’Or-winning Anora, this moment of transcendence comes in the film’s final scene.

I won’t spoil it, but suffice to say it was so compelling, it made tears literally shoot out of my eyes like they were under firehose pressure.

The closing scene is also the one moment of stillness in a film that moves like it’s on fire.

But before we get to this place, we must begin at the beginning.

Things get off to a rock-’em, sock-’em start in a raunchy Brooklyn strip club, where young women are soliciting men for lap dances. One of these young women is Ani Mikheeva (Mikey Madison). Ani is short for Anora, but Ani is not interested in anything to do with her Armenian heritage. Although she stops short of calling herself a sex worker, she is willing to do any number of physical acts for money.

One night, the club manager persuades her to entertain some upscale clients as she is the only dancer in the club who speaks Russian. A not-so-meet-cute occurs between Ani and Vanya (Mark Eydelshteyn). It isn’t exactly love at first sight, but Vanya is flush with cash, and his Brighton Beach McMansion is impressive enough that Ani agrees to a deal. She’ll be his escort for one week for the grand sum of $15,000.

Vanya barely bats an eye at the cost. For the next while it’s a whirlwind of parties, drugs, Vegas hotel rooms and a whole lot of sex.

At the end of an extended session of debauchery, the pair, tangled in expensive hotel sheets, unexpectedly discuss marriage. This might come as something of a shock, especially given the dissolute lifestyle both partners are keen to enjoy.

Nevertheless, Ani and her paramour head to the chapel, tie the knot and keep right on partying.

When news that Vanya is married reaches the ears of his oligarch parents living in Russia, the real action begins to ramp up. The couple doesn’t realize that their spontaneous decision has set in motion a series of events that will reduce everyone involved to little more than smoking ruins.

A fixer by the name of Toros (Karren Karagulian), an Orthodox priest, and Vanya’s godfather are summoned summarily out of a christening ceremony and charged with getting the straight goods on the new marriage. Toros engages two helpers, Garnick (Vache Tovmasyan) and Igor (Yura Borisov), who descend on the newlyweds.

At this point, a pause is in order. Up until now, the characters are barely sketched out. Sure, Vanya appears to be little more than a pumped-up party boy, eager to partake of sex, drugs and video games, in that order. Ani, dazzled by fur coats and expensive houses, seems naive and predatory in equal measure.

But it’s a little unclear who these two truly are, until the great testing begins: here is where the film takes a hard turn into more complex territory.

A caper, and a study in craft

At the news that his parents are currently on their way from Russia, Vanya hightails it like a scared rabbit, leaving his new bride behind with the trio of hired fixers.

If there was any doubt that Ani is a force of nature, such quibbles fall aside in the sustained shriek of rage that comes boiling out of her slender frame. Having tasted what money can provide, she is not about to let go of her newly acquired husband without a fight. And what a fight it is. In short order, she reduces Toros and his thuggish helpers into beaten, bloody and subdued men desperate for her help.

The quartet set out on an extended quest to find the missing Vanya, traversing the length of Brooklyn, right down to the boardwalk of Coney Island. It is Toros’s mission to ensure that the marriage is annulled, but he needs both parties present and Vanya is nowhere to be found.

The meat of the action takes place in a night-long search, as curious places of solidarity and commiseration begin to arise. Toros might be chained by unbreakable commitment to Vanya’s family, but he’s not without sympathy. So, too, are Igor and Garnick, who slowly reveal their own vulnerability in different ways.

The group comes to realize that they are bound, in the same fashion, through economic precarity. They are all workers, and they collectively have more in common with one another than with the obscenely rich people who pull the strings.

Offered $10,000 to agree to an annulment, Ani initially goes along with things but insists that she be allowed to speak to Vanya first. There is no doubt that she has her own agenda. So, it’s off to the races, fast on the trail of her errant husband, who has apparently decided that the solution to all his problems lies at the bottom of a bottle. The clock is ticking as the dreaded parents draw ever nearer.

With the stakes vertiginously high and getting steeper every moment, will Ani prevail, keep her newly minted hubby with his family money, or be kicked to the curb like so much used refuse?

Since this is a Sean Baker film, you might be able to hazard a reasonable guess. But Anora is not without a surprise or two. One of these is the family dynamic of the Zakharov clan. Father Nikolai (Aleksei Serebryakov) is not the one who holds the power in the family; it is Galina (Darya Ekamasova), Vanya’s terrifying mother, who sets the tone of the action.

The sheer exhilaration of the film’s ratcheting, rocketing pace is one thing. All of the principals acting their asses off is another.

But in all honesty, I’m still pondering my own reaction to the film’s ending and everything that led up to it.

A powerful meditation on work and class

So, what to conclude when the narrative’s relentless sound and fury fall away? The rich and powerful continue in their usual fashion, little perturbed by this recent interruption of their privilege. But what of Ani the interloper, the striving one vying for some measure of the same largesse?

That the status quo will prevail is never much in question. But in Anora, something else emerges. Call it grace, generosity or a blunt species of nobility. These things are strangely more destabilizing than almost all the drama that precede them. The film left me both bereft and oddly hopeful at the same time.

Baker is one of the few filmmakers who is actively interested in the power dynamics of sex and sex workers, and arguably class. In another filmmaker’s hands, the story of Ani might come across as exploitive, but Baker has such compassion and genuine curiosity about his characters that his films leap lightly over judgment and prurience, landing solidly on unexpected ground.

Everything turns on the penultimate moments of commiseration and kindness that take place at the end of the story. Or as Billy Shakespeare once wrote: “So shines a good deed in a naughty world.”

Change that to a transactional world, and respect and generosity come as a profound shock to the system.

The very fact that this is so makes you cognizant of just how grim things are in terms of human relationships.

But people will always surprise you.

‘Anora’ is now out in major theatres.