Anora “Ani” (Mikey Madison) knows what she wants and throws her whole body into it, literally and head over heels. In the very first scene, Sean Baker burns it into the screen and into our heads: a room bathed in blue-violet neon light, strippers dancing in slow motion in front of seated men or making out on their laps, accompanied by Take That’s soaring pop anthem “Greatest Day”. The camera lingers on Ani, capturing her “serving” a customer, and the red lights in the background look like sparks.
With the opening scene, Baker sets up a bracket that should not be forgotten until the end of the 138-minute tour de force that his heroine Ani experiences. “Today this could be, the greatest day of our lives” sing the boyband poppers from Take That, and the subjunctive mood describes the narrative mode of Anora, for which Baker received the Palme d’Or at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. He dedicated the award to all sex workers.
Armed with her e-cigarette and her physical arguments, Ani goes to a New York strip club seven days a week to catch customers. Because she is the only one in the club who speaks Russian, she is ordered by her boss to look after Ivan “Vanya” (Mark Eydelshteyn), the hedonistic son of an oligarch, and his friends – it’s also wonderful that Eydelshteyn’s youngster looks like a raggedy revenant of Timothée Chalamet. In any case, one thing leads to another, the private striptease is followed by sex for money and the offer for Ani to play his “permanently horny” girlfriend for a week. He offers her 10,000 dollars, she bargains him up to 15,000.
The first half of Anora is pure excess. Ani happily swaps her life in the run-down house by the railroad tracks for Vanya’s modernist mansion, sex, drugs and rock’n’roll. Baker celebrates the ectasy, showing the couple having constant fun at parties in the villa and finally in Las Vegas, where a party-induced, music video-like, fast-paced monthly sequence is followed by the wedding of the two lovebirds, including four-carat bling. The boundaries between economic interests and actual love become blurred and Ani and Vanya are both completely human in their naively sympathetic way in their hunger for life and their sometimes amoral decisions.
Sean Baker has taken the side of marginalized social figures like no other. In Starlet, he told the story of a porn actress in “Porn Valley”, in Tangerine L.A. he followed two transgender prostitutes and other characters through the streets of Los Angeles with his smartphone camera. The Florida Project was about an overburdened but loving mother and her daughter, who keep their heads above water by giving handouts or selling cheap perfume. The fact that the two live in the “Magic Castle”, a run-down motel not far from the Walt Disney Resort, is the visual manifestation of the contrast that all Baker films, including his last film Red Rocket about an ex-porn star, have in common: between dream and reality, between cinematic playfulness and social realism.
Ani’s dream is shattered in Baker’s brash, sexual version of the classic Pretty Woman, which is often referred to in film texts for good reason, when Vanya’s parents sic the local henchmen on their son. “He married a prostitute?!” yells Toros (Karren Karaguljan) into the telephone receiver. When he turns up at the villa with Garnick (Watsche Towmasjan) and Igor (Juri Borisow) to force the newlyweds to annul their marriage, events come thick and fast: Vanya takes off and Ani smashes up half the villa and a nose in the fight before the unwilling would-be thugs can stop her.
Baker turns his brash Cinderella story into a modern screwball comedy when Ani sets off in search of Vanya with the three quirky, yet not unlikeable guys who bring her closer to Igor. Brighton Beach, Coney Island, bars, clubs: the images and the insanely entertaining scenes that tip over into the absurd are vibrant – and yet Baker succeeds in ensuring that the different milieus through which he sends his quartet do not become superficial. Baker’s humanistic view of sex workers and the “little people” is full of empathy, and his once again great ensemble, above all Mikey Madison, makes you want to embrace them.
“Anora” is a movie that, despite all the very successful mechanisms of entertainment cinema, is subversively bubbling under the surface. There are the small details and Ani’s glances on the sidelines that tell us something other than just fun. There are often two sides to the laughter, because as funny as the scenes are: What does it all mean for Ani, who is chasing after her perhaps naive but completely understandable castle in the air?
During the wild nocturnal ride of the community of fate, all of whom are humiliated in their own way by the oligarchs, a realization manifests itself that Baker has always worked on: that money and class rule the system and that the American dream is also a perverse one. At the very end, after this madness, the parenthesis closes and the (capitalist) dream and real emotions come into contact, revealing all the bitterness.