Anora

This story begins one night in a classy-ish Manhattan strip club, where Anora “Ani” Mikheeva (Mikey Madison) works as a dancer and occasional escort. Ani is a striver and a hustler: She might be only 23 years old, but she knows how to work a room. She glides up to customers, flashes her smile, and lures them into the club’s private rooms with the smooth precision of someone who sells the same dream a dozen times a night, seven nights a week. It’s a potent fantasy, to be sure, but a fantasy just the same. The red-tinsel extensions woven into Ani’s chestnut hair might shimmer with the promise of true love, but every morning, she wipes off her makeup, counts her money, and schleps back to south Brooklyn, where she and her sister rent a tiny house in Brighton Beach.

On this fateful night, however, Ani’s fortunes are forever changed when a prince walks through the door of her club – or at least as close to a prince as can be found in New York City in 2024. Ivan “Vanya” Zakharov (Mark Eydelshteyn) is the shiftless scion of an obscenely wealthy Russian oligarch, and although he is legally an adult, he carries himself with the heedless good-time energy of an unchaperoned high-school sophomore. Quickly marking Vanya for a whale, the club’s manager pairs him with Ani, whose unassimilated immigrant grandmother taught her enough Russian to understand (if not fluently speak) the language. Just as swiftly, Ani works her spell on the poor dope, and soon he is not only paying for lap dances but offering her private escort work at his home. (Like Ani, he also lives in Brooklyn, but his gargantuan modernist mansion might as well be on a different planet from her shared tumbledown two-bedroom.)

Vanya is an overgrown child – aside from strippers and ketamine, his primary passion is video games – but he seems to lack the malicious entitlement of most new-money brats. There’s a sweet, callow sincerity to his affections that Ani finds charming, despite herself. Soon a Garry Marshall-worthy deal is struck: For $15,000, Ani agrees to play the part of Vanya’s “super horny girlfriend,” gallivanting around New York with his friends and hangers-on for seven hedonistic days. Eventually, this nonstop party of sex, drugs, and VIP bottle service diverts to Las Vegas, where Vanya makes another spur-of-the-moment proposal. As he sees it, he wouldn’t be obliged to return to Russia to learn the family business if he settled down with an American wife. Quickie wedding chapels abound in Nevada, after all, and before you can say “green card,” Ani has a four-carat diamond ring on her finger and the couple have a marriage certificate.

Even incurable romantics will probably sense that this fairy tale isn’t going to resolve in storybook fashion. This is America, after all, where money trumps everything, even young lust (to say nothing of love). During the couple’s honeymoon staycation back in Brooklyn, Ani warily eyes the flashing voicemail notifications piling up on her new husband’s phone. “You told them, right?” she asks, referring to Vanya’s family. “Sure,” is the reply, but the lie in this dismissal is obvious from the apoplectic reaction of Vanya’s godfather, Toros (Karren Karagulian), a hapless Orthodox priest-cum-gangster. Attempting to sooth the panic of the kid’s parents – who are already en route from Moscow – Toros dispatches anxious Armenian henchman Garnick (Vache Tovmasyan) and taciturn Russian leg-breaker Igor (Yura Borisov) to knock on Vanya’s door and verify the marriage rumors that are roiling on Russian social media.

Of course, Ani is no debutante, and the unstoppable force of Toros and his goons collides explosively with the immovable object of her spitfire, bridge-and-tunnel attitude. In a different sort of movie, this Cinderella story would play out in unconventional but still happily-ever-after fashion, with the titular heroine scheming and schmoozing her way into the good graces of Vanya’s family (and a comfortable future in the 0.01%) through pure moxie. There’s just one problem: The Palme d’Or-winning Anora is written and directed by Sean Baker (The Florida Project, Red Rocket), and he does not believe in fairy tales. He does believe in America, however. In our unrelenting, unabashed trashiness. In our obsession with at-all-cost survival and undeserved second chances. And most of all in the longing for a sliver of genuine human connection that can pierce our hardened, narcissistic hearts. It turns out that there is a sad little sort-of fairy tale lurking right in front of our eyes in Anora. It’s not just the one that we, or Ani, expected.

For more than two decades now, Baker has established himself as one of our finest native chroniclers of life in These United States Today, and there’s something immensely fitting about his twisted, funny, and ultimately forlorn version of a Disney-princess story finally clinching him the most prestigious prize in international cinema. It doesn’t hurt that Anora is an immensely entertaining film, starting out as a whirlwind tale of star-crossed romance set against a lifestyle-porn backdrop. This eventually mutates into a Safdie-esque after-hours search for a missing husband across two boroughs, in a nifty, farcical reversal of the Cinderella story. (There’s no glass slipper here, just an idiot on a bender who doesn’t want to be found.) Looming over this story are the long, imperious shadows of Vanya’s parents (Aleksei Serebyakov and Darya Ekamasova), whose expectation is that Toros will already have their son’s marriage annulled by the time their private jet touches down in New York.

It would be a little ungenerous to say that Madison (Better Things, Scream) carries Anora, given that the whole cast is in fine form. This is unsurprising, as Baker and his collaborators have long excelled at assembling top-notch rosters of under-appreciated actors, who often portray outcasts with hidden claws and secret depths. In particular, the Keystone Krooks triumvirate of Karagulian, Tovmasyan, and Borisov leaves a charmingly pathetic impression, though even bit players like Lindsey Normington as Ani’s spiteful strip-club rival and Anton Bitter as Vanya’s knucklehead friend help to establish the sensation of a grubby, lived-in world. Still, Anora doesn’t work without a compelling leading lady, and Madison’s glorious, unselfconscious performance – blackened at the edge with risk-addicted self-loathing – is one the key reasons the feature is able to sustain such incredible energy. This is the case even when the characters themselves are bumbling and flailing around nocturnal New York, or when the action returns to Las Vegas as the walls close in on Ani, or even when the story downshifts into a third act that also functions as quietly deflating coda to the whole sticky, miserable situation.

It’s difficult to talk about Anora in depth without discussing the contours of its late-game narrative turns, which are at once emotionally thrilling and strangely predictable, given how relentlessly the film signals its intentions throughout. The sheer reliability of unreliable people is one of the more prominent recurring themes in Baker’s work, and his latest feature reinforces that putting one’s faith in a proven cheat, crook, or loser is a recipe for surefire disappointment. Anora is, in part, an anti-fairy tale about how the dragon of banal self-interest (almost) always wins in the end, but it’s also about how devilishly easy it is to overlook real devotion and affection in a grasping, light-speed place like contemporary America. There might be a performative edge to Ani’s shock (shock!) when the backstabbing hobgoblins that serve the late-capitalist juggernaut fuck her over yet again, but it pales in comparison to her dazed, vulnerable reaction when she is sideswiped by something she never expected. Even if we could see it coming a mile away.