Written and Directed by Sean Baker | 139 min | ▲▲▲▲▲ | Amazon Prime

An earlier version of this review  appeared on FITI in September during #AIFF24

Anora 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 comparable in quality, maybe better than some of them.

It’s from talented American indie filmmaker Sean Baker (Tangerine, The Florida Project, and Red Rocket), though is also 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 of Brighton Beach, in Brooklyn, New York. When Ivan, the son of a Russian oligarch, visits the club where she performs he invites her to join him at his massive, garish mansion. They hit it off, they party, do a lot of drugs, and end up taking a private jet to Las Vegas.  It seems that her professional life overlaps with her sexual life in a way that’s entirely transactional, so following a week of intimacy that he’s paid for when he asks her to marry him, she agrees, provided he can get her the ring she wants. Of course, he’ll get a green card that will free him from having to ever leave the United States.

She says she’s in love, but what does that mean to Anora? When you’re 23 and you’ve had to work so hard to get anything in your life, when someone offers you total financial freedom, you commit. Makes all kinds of sense. And what does love mean to Ivan? And the key question of this awkward, chaotic love story — how will it hold together?

Their nuptials don’t go over well with the Armenian thugs who work for Ivan’s 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 too 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 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, though it never quite steps over the line into crime thriller territory. It’s more a sad romance and a cultural portrait.

People have called the film a 21st Century Pretty Woman, but it’s got a whole lot more edge, rooted in character. Mikey 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 her trauma. 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 at the picture’s conclusion drives home some truths about Ani, where she finally drops her shields and shows us what this experience has cost her.

It’s maybe just a little too long, but nonetheless an enervating, hilarious, and unforgettable film.