“Anora,” which won the Palme D’or (top honor) at the Cannes Film Festival this summer and is currently being positioned as an Academy Award frontrunner, arrives in theaters nationwide this month.
The acclaimed comedy/drama is the latest from writer and director Sean Baker, the independent auteur behind “The Florida Project” and “Red Rocket.”
“Anora” closely follows its title character, who works as an erotic dancer/sex worker on the margins of Brooklyn and finds herself, like all of Baker’s protagonists, chasing the proverbial tail of the American Dream.
The film begins with the weight of this promise from its opening frames, as Anora, or Ani as she prefers to be called, perfunctorily performs for a client, with a techno remix of Take That’s “Greatest Day” emanating through the speakers.
“Today this could be the greatest day of our lives.”
This promise, or “greatest day,” arrives in Ivan, who goes by Vanya(played by newcomer Mark Eydelshteyn), the 21-year-old son of an uber-wealthy Russian oligarch, who immediately takes a shine to Ani, taking her on as a client beyond the confines of her less-than-desirable club.
Not before long, the two impulsively get married in Las Vegas, allowing Ivan to obtain his green card.
Once the news reaches Russia, her fairytale romance becomes threatened, as Ivan’s prejudiced parents set out for America to have the marriage annulled.
“Anora” maintains Baker’s career-long predilection for capturing figures living on the margins, characters who have been straddled by the woes of inequality, and have seemingly slipped between the cracks of America’s faulty socioeconomic fabric as a result.
Yet, for the first time in his career, Baker has his protagonist directly approach the line of inequality and the line between haves and have-nots, examining America and its divides.
The film boldly asks what happens when these so-called marginal figures become the interest points of higher powers, exploring how, ultimately, expendable the working class truly can become.
As Anora’s delusions catch up with her, the distance between her romantic fantasy and socioeconomic reality becomes increasingly dissonant; the psychology of money and the desperation it engenders loom over every interaction.
While perhaps not as texturally precise as the aforementioned “Florida Project” or “Red Rocket,” movies that strive in funneling inward toward the hearts of their specific milieus, “Anora” consistently expands outward, both in filmmaking scope and in thematic resonance.
The 2 hr 20 min. movie marks a deft elevation in Baker’s cinematic kineticism — – one that owes as many debts to the chaotic muscularity of gritty 1970s New York dramas like “The French Connection” and “The Taking of Pelham One Two Three” as it does to the classical tropes of the romantic comedy genre — yet the movie never loses sight of its humanistic qualities.
Mikey Madison, known best for her small roles in “Scream” and “Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood,” delivers an extraordinary performance in the titular role that, like the film itself, operates as an audacious yet delicate high-wire act.
She confidently navigates a screwball narrative that threatens to topple over at any moment, or overtake the seriousness of its subject matter, yet “Anora” only grows more thorny and devastating in its moral ambiguity, despite how hilarious it often is.
Baker expertly straddles between subjectivity and objectivity, with the mystery and complexity between these fraught characters revealing a heartbreaking treatise on the intersection between being seen and being commodified, and what happens when both those highly-charged emotional trajectories are taken away from you.
While the fantasy slips from Ani’s fingers, the audience is left to pick up the pieces, resulting in a conclusion that ranks among the best in any recent American movie and acts as an adult Rorschach test of an ending.
“Anora” is electrifying filmmaking, euphoric and devastating in equal measure. It is one of the best movies of the year.
“Anora” is now playing in theaters nationwide.
