I think I first heard about Anora in the spring when all the baller critics who got to go to Cannes were talking about it all over Film Twitter, the articles, and Podcasts. So I’m interested: what is this Anora film, and is it as fire as these folks are talking about? Once that first screening email hit, I was like, I got to see this joint, and what I saw was something that wasn’t as smack-in-the-face amazing as all these other folks were talking about. Anora, written and directed by Sean Baker and starring Mikey Madison as Ani, short for Anora, is a young Russian-American woman who lives in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn and works as a dancer (stripper) in Manhattan. Her boss connects her to a Russian-speaking patron of the club. This one time, she meets a young man, Vanya (Mark Eydelshteyn), the son of a wealthy Russian oligarch who takes a liking to Ani to the point he has her move into the mansion he’s living in. Like Richard Gere’s character in Pretty Woman, he starts paying Ani to be his girlfriend. For Ani, this seems like a way out of poverty as Vanya decides to marry her during a trip to Vegas with his “friends.”
Things go left from here as his parents Nikolai and Galina (Aleksei Serebryakov and Darya Ekamasova) find out and send Vanya’s handler/babysitter, Toros (Karren Karagulian), to fix it by the time they get to the US. Toros sends his brother Garnick (Vache Tovmasyan) and his goon Igor (Yura Borisov) to get Vanya together and talk to the girl [Ani], which then gets crazy. The bulk of the film is Ani, Toros, Garnick, and Igor, who search for Vanya as he runs away. Madison’s Ani is older than Vanya, not by much, but going by their lives, her maturity level is league beyond his. We get to see her feelings start to mix with her desire to have a better life. Those things are shown so wonderfully on her face during her performance. You see that you get it, and you’re riding with her, like yeah, you want her to get out of her situation at home and stop dancing. A big part of her motivations is family; she wants one as hers is spread around, but the nature of marrying into a family with two parents and a home and a future that sounds like the American Dream to me, right? It’s more realistic to get swept up off your feet like the fairy tale Pretty Woman is than the whole work hard, meet a nice guy, and settle down for the future, but just like a Disney film, it’s all cap and the real world doesn’t work like that.
Ani’s fireworks of a relationship with Vanya are shown in contrast to her interactions with Igor, a Russian dude who essentially gets it how he lives but with a code of honor. Much like Omar Little said many years ago, a man has to have a code. During their interactions, she engages in aggression as she’s in full flight or fight mode and is fighting. Borisov’s Igor treats her with as much care as possible because of the bad situation. He plays this guy as such a captivating silent that you see glimpses of warmth through just body language and nice subtle expressions. Madison and Borisov have good chemistry on film as their interactions begin hostile and then cool down to that of teammates. This dynamic is the one that really brought me into the film as, for me, until the story shifts, my tastes still skew to a film like HUSTLERS than this. For me like that, gotta go get it because no one is here to save you; you gotta do it yourself. It’s a sentiment in a show like P-Valley on STARZ as well. That might be because, from what I’ve seen and heard, that’s how Dancers of color have to move, and it’s something I feel when those stories are made are overlooked. It’s not cute. It’s the struggle, and it’s one that might not be seen as admirable.
While this film isn’t a fairy tale or something with a super positive ending, it did feel like coming out of the film “Pretty Woman for Gen Z,” and that might be completely ok. I really enjoyed the film as it has some great humor bits and strong dramatic parts. It’s a film that feels like it’s about current young people and not like Euphoria, where it is teens in the current day living out lives from 1997 or something. Anora is one of the best of the late year period, easy peezy and something you should take time to see in theaters. Yet do not go in expecting to be bowled over like it’s one of the best films in cinema history like I’ve seen some talk about it.
Score: B+
