By Dolores Quintana
Anora is writer and director Sean Baker’s newest punch to the cinematic consciousness. It is a chaotic fairytale where Cinderella has a powerful right hook and an equally powerful heart. It’s like cinematic cocaine and only in the best sense.
There is a real excitement around the film and I can assure you that the excitement is very real and comes from Baker’s powerful filmmaking and insights about the human character.
You can watch the Red Band trailer here:
Here is the synopsis: Anora, a young sex worker from Brooklyn, gets her chance at a Cinderella story when she meets and impulsively marries the son of an oligarch. Once the news reaches Russia, her fairytale is threatened as the parents set out for New York to get the marriage annulled.
Baker has not only an amazing understanding of human needs and foibles, but he champions those who society normally looks down on. With Anora, he is taking on one of the most easily disparaged groups: erotic dancers and sex workers.
It is easy to be contemptuous of young women who undertake this profession and scorn has been heaped upon them from time immemorial. Baker has put a sex worker who is an exceptionally strong and uncompromising woman who doesn’t tolerate being disparaged at the center of the narrative.
Mikey Madison plays Anora/Ani, Mark Eydelshteyn plays Ivan “Vanya” Zakharov, Yura Borisov plays Igor, Karren Karagulian plays Toros, Vache Tovmasyan plays Garnick, Ivy Wolk plays Crystal, and Aleksei Serebryakov plays Nikolai Zakharov.
The film is like every wild night you’ve ever had where things are larger than life and so amazing that you wish every day could be like that, but you know it never could. If you’ve never had that type of chaos in your life, it’s addicting and intoxicating. It might be the reason people do drugs. They need that kind of excitement, eternally. But that’s why I called it cinematic cocaine, on the upswing of the narrative, it has an exhilarating high that takes the audience and the viewer on a ride, unlike most films. It is filled with authentic joy.
Baker has totally captured that kind of high on film, that feeling of being young, gorgeous, rich, and that you will never have to pay the bill, running from excess to wild adventure. The world is yours.
Mikey Madison, who made her mark in Better Things, Scream, and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is a star. Her Ani/Anora, who refuses to go by her more ethnic name, glows with beauty and charm, but under her tough shell, has real warmth and tenderness that she guards fiercely. She yearns for more. Her performance is not the cliche so long beloved by Hollywood screenwriters about women of her profession. She’s a real person and it goes a long way towards showing the audience that the women of her vocation are people. You can see why Ivan falls for her and how she gently begins to trust.
Mark Eydelshteyn as Ivan is at first charismatic and commanding, but much more fragile and ruined than he first appears. He is a man who creates wreckage by playing with people like toys because he doesn’t have the spine he thinks he has.
Another character that is so memorable is the sad-eyed Igor played by Yura Borisov. He’s quiet but Borisov slowly peels away the character’s layers of goodness and decency. He’s not what Hollywood would write as the usual henchman either.
Sean Baker has taken characters that normally are cliches and expands them with humanity and grace. Nearly everyone is multi-layered and someone that you can empathize with even when they are doing things that are not good or good for them.
More than that, Baker brings out the natural comedy of the situation and the film is frequently hilarious and sometimes tragicomic, but it’s never at the expense of the characters. His vision is unclouded by the tired tropes. He writes and directs living and breathing human beings and you can tell he does not look down on them, especially Ani and her friends.
There’s a reason why the film won the Palme d’Or, the first American film to win the prize since 2011.
Anora is the fragile human soul wrapped in a Russian sable, suffused with hope that can roar into blinding rage. It is the story of those who are shot into the sky to be beautiful and self-destruct for rich men’s amusement or evolve into something new. Who really has the power and what is the real currency? Money might be able to buy you a good time, but it can never give you that tender core of goodness and mercy.
Sean Baker’s powerful filmmaking has the magic to bring empathy to those who society stigmatizes. Indeed, Anora is the empathy machine that Roger Ebert spoke of not too long ago.
