This was one that I had the chance to see at #TIFF24, but held off knowing it was waiting for me back here on the final night of the Atlantic International Film Festival. It comes freighted in hype and awards, having taken home the Palme D’Or at Cannes, that festival’s highest honour. Consider the past few winners of that particular award: Anatomy Of A Fall, Triangle of Sadness, Titane, and Parasite. Anora is easily comparable in quality.
It’s from talented American indie filmmaker Sean Baker (Tangerine, The Florida Project, and Red Rocket), though is a departure from those films — it serves up a broader palate and clearly a bigger budget. Anora, or Ani, is an exotic dancer and sex worker in the Russian American enclave in Brighton Beach, New York. When the son of a Russian oligarch, Ivan, visits the club where she performs he invites her to work outside the club and join him at his massive, garish mansion. They hit it off, they party, do a lot of drugs, and end up in Las Vegas on a private jet. Her professional life and sexual life is entirely transactional, so following a week of sex that he’s paid for when he asks her to marry him, she agrees — they find a Vegas quickie wedding chapel to do the deed. Their nuptials don’t go over well with the Armenian thugs who work for his parents. They want to lock this down and get the marriage annulled as soon as possible.
Cue one of the funniest scenes of the year, a mid-movie tour de force that takes place in the living room of Ivan’s house and involves good 20 minutes of comical violence that never shifts into camp — the stakes here are too high and the threat to real. These goons are serious even if they’re not good at their jobs. You get the feeling that at any moment if someone presents a gun or a knife this could go very badly for everyone. Baker has a knack for sustaining that underlying, skin-crawling suspense, even while in broad strokes Anora could be described as a comedy. In that it shares a distinct management of tone with some of Quentin Tarantino’s work — but unlike many of QT’s films it never quite steps over the line into crime thriller territory. It’s more a sad love story and a cultural portrait.
And it’s rooted in character. Mickey Madison is a revelation in the lead, someone who had a lot of pride and self-respect, but is also putting up a good front to hide the trauma she lives with. As Ivan, Mark Eydelshteyn occasionally sounds like a son of Borat, but his clueless enthusiasm is infectious — even as their union feels wildly ill-advised, you can’t help but root for these kids.
Anora could’ve been a chronicle of an awkward and unfortunate few days in the American immigrant experience, but it goes a lot deeper than that in the unlikely connection between Anora and Igor (Yura Borisov), one of the goons sent to disrupt this union, and the tonal shift in last five minutes of the picture drives home some truths about Ani, where she finally drops her shields and shows us what this experience has cost her. Hilarious, enervating, and unforgettable.
