Anora review - life lesson for a kick-ass sex worker

Anora has had so much hype since it won the Palme d’Or at Cannes in May that it doesn’t really need another reviewer weighing in. Sean Baker has crafted a high-velocity drama in three acts with a star-making turn by its lead Mikey Madison in the title role. She prefers to be called Ani and makes her living in a lap-dancing club in Manhattan by night before sleeping away her days in a run-down house in Brooklyn, right next to the rattle of the elevated train. 

Self-possessed and skilled at getting cash out of clients with some well-rehearsed gyrations, Ani is the latest in Sean Baker’s portraits of sex workers in America. In Tangerine, we spent 24 hours with a trans hooker fresh out of jail and tracking down an errant boyfriend–pimp in downtown LA. The Florida Project focused on the six-year-old daughter of a stripper struggling to make ends meet in a motel near Disney World. Red Rocket tracked a failed porn actor back to his home town in Texas. Baker doesn’t use film sets, but inserts his professional actors into genuine locations and Anora is no exception, its action moving from New York to Las Vegas before ending up in Coney Island.

These locations add hugely to the atmosphere of his films. When we meet Ani in the club the camera glides through an array of barely clad lap dancers. Clients and suppliers look utterly real. When she is told a customer has requested a Russian speaker, she probably wasn’t expecting him to be slight, boyish Vanya (Mark Eidelshtein), the juvenile son of oligarchs.

Vanya's delighted with Ani's performance (she’s initially less impressed with his) and offers a wedge of cash for her exclusive services for a week. The couple settle into his family's out-of-town mansion, a vast ultramodern pile overlooking Jamaica Bay, complete with an underground garage lined with luxury cars and its own infinity pool. 

With his parents nowhere in sight, Vanya and Ani turn the lavish pad into a fun house before they take off on a private plane with his friends to carry on partying in Las Vegas. Vanya is seemingly infatuated with Ani and is certainly keen to stay in the US: cue a massive diamond ring, an outrageous fur coat, and a trip to the legendary Little White Wedding Chapel for the pair, much to his distant parents’ outrage.

When Vanya goes on the run, their goons hold on to Ani until they can get their marriage annulled but she’s having none of it. The third act of Anora repeats tropes and scenes from Tangerine. Not only is our heroine in search of an absent man not worthy of her, but – as in Tangerine – there’s a lurid vomiting scene and a lengthy sex act in a car where the windows are ingeniously muffled from the outside world.

This repetition doesn’t matter hugely and may pass unnoticed while we’re distracted by the shift from colour-saturated Vegas to wintry Brighton Beach, but it does hint at the limited box of tricks that Baker has to riff on. Ani loses some of her strutting bravado after Vanya’s abandonment. She’s trying to outfox the goons, played by the director’s regulars, Karren Karragulian (pictured above centre) and Vincent Radwinsky, and she proves herself as good a fighter as a dancer.  It’s hard to know with Mikey Madison what to admire most in her electrifying Ani, her extraordinarily expressive face or her physical prowess.

It’s been clear from the outset that Anora wasn’t going to be a straightforward riff on Cinderella and Pretty Woman. When Vanya reappears, he’s a dead-eyed shadow of his former self. But Baker can’t resist offering a glimmer of redemption for Ani in her interaction with the quietest of the goons, Igor (Yuri Borisov, pictured above left, who was so good in Compartment Number 6). Whether you buy that depends on whether you’ve signed up for Baker’s version of the world of sex workers as self-empowered.  Either way, it’s a wild ride of a film.

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