A sex comedy that scores big time.
Sean Baker is a brilliant independent filmmaker with a list of entries including “Tangerine,” “The Florida Project,” and “Red Rocket.” His new film “Anora” is further proof of his professionalism. It’s a movie that plays almost like a Tarantino entry, because of the characters, their situations, their backgrounds, and how the R-rating takes their dialogue and profanity to new heights. I saw this movie last week, and I’m still amazed at how Baker is able to pull it off, even on a small scale.
His new lead is the only actor I know in this movie. It’s Mikey Madison, who has played serial killers in “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” and “Scream” (2022). In “Anora,” she is quite the revelation as Anora-whom she likes to call herself Annie-a Uzbek-American sex worker in Brooklyn, whose latest client Ivan (Mark Eidelshtein) is the immature son of a wealthy and domineering Russian oligarch. Her Russian is a little rusty as is his English, but they still appreciate each other for their efforts.
This might be considered to be, by attribute, a “Cinderella” story, minus the evil stepmothers and mice. A stripper and a rich kid would match the description on a different level. It would take a filmmaker like Sean Baker to give the genre a twist with a lot of cursing, sex, and violence, and the way the actors comment on them couldn’t be more honest or consistent.
The young man pays her to be his girlfriend and sex buddy, who watches him vape and play video games, and even agreeing to marry him in Las Vegas, so he can flip off his parents. From what we see, the mother Galina (Darya Ekamoasova) is more stern than the father Nikolai (Aleksei Serebryakov), so I think she’s more peeved that her son has married someone whom she calls a “prostitute.” This puts his family at such a risk, that they put his godfather Torras (Karren Karagulian) and his Horace and Jasper type goons: Garnick (Vache Tovmasyan) and Igor (Yura Borisov) in charge of separating these two.
Of course, they try to explain to them the concept of love, but with the boy’s immaturity and the girl’s stubbornness, it turns into a long, comical, and hectic day. The kind when you’re stressed out by the situations and cringing at the choices made here, and the same time, you’re laughing and amazed at how Baker writes and directs these characters and scenes. Even when we’re cringing, we’re still entertained by the results.
Let me make a comparison with the choice of vulgarity presented in NEON’s “Anora” and Amazon’s “Jackpot.” “Jackpot” was a commercial film that thought that mean-spirited characters and their hostile behaviors are what makes a comedy a hit. It may have been popular on the streaming site, but it was a big bomb in my opinion. In “Anora,” the behaviors are handled with honesty by Baker. It makes us laugh without being so desperate, it has characters we want to acknowledge (or maybe we don’t for some of them), and it has high aspirations in the independent circuit.
Madison gives a career best performance as a stripper thinking that she may be in love, but struggles to acknowledge what she has gotten herself into. And as usual, she specializes in screaming and cursing, but in this case, she handles them with the right kind of attitude. Karagulian delivers with ambition, and even he and Eidelshtein admitted at a Q&A that they weren’t really prepared for what the screenplay would provide. And Borisov is often funny with his goofy and honest appeal. In fact, he feels like he got transferred from Russia to Dunder Mifflin if you read between the lines.
“Anora” is one of the year’s best films, told in a fresh perspective that will entertain you in different ways.
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