Review: 'Anora' Goes Where 'Pretty Woman' Didn't Dare Walk

(SPOT.ph) Writer-director Sean Baker specializes in capturing lives lived at the margins of modern American society: the lives of trans sex workers in Los Angeles mired in petty romantic quarrels or stuck trying to get their dreams off the ground (Tangerine, 2015); of kids playing around decrepit motels at the edge of Walt Disney World while the adults tasked to care for them face heartbreaking life-or-death dilemmas (The Florida Project, 2017); of a retired porn actor casually wreaking havoc during his Texas homecoming while he plots a comeback (Red Rocket, 2021).

Baker’s films tend to be shaggy dog affairs, his camera following the characters as they meander through their day to day, capturing the grit and humor of negotiating with a hard, uncompromising world. In Anora, his first feature film as a solo screenwriter since his 2000 debut Four Letter Words, Baker adopts a more rigid storytelling structure than usual; the result is his most accessible film in decades, but one that doesn’t skip the vibrant messiness of hardscrabble living that interests him as a filmmaker.

Baker has also decided to employ actors with more experience, and the result is a triumphant, tour de force turn from 25-year-old Mikey Madison, who before this breakthrough performance played a psychotic member of the Manson family in Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood (2019) and a psychotic fan of the in-universe slasher franchise in Scream (2022).

Whirlwind week of debauchery

Madison is the title character, a stripper who prefers to go by the name Ani. She’s a woman who is accustomed to playing a role when it comes to facing the clients who frequent the Brooklyn club where she gyrates for a living—preferring to hide her fluency in Russian and going by her nickname because being honest about who she is makes her vulnerable; emphatically setting boundaries when she administers lap dances even as she moonlights as a prostitute; pretending to be charming and pliable though her soul is cynical and hardened.

One night, her boss introduces her to a high roller whose specifications for a companion fit Ani to a T: the spoiled son of a Russian oligarch named Vanya (Mark Eydelshteyn, looking like Timothée Chalamet’s good-for-nothing baby brother) who has free rein of his parents’ Brighton Beach mansion. Vanya is a teenager with a lot of raging hormones and dirty money, and after a daytime tryst, he offers Ani $15,000 to be his “horny girlfriend” for a week. After striking the deal, Ani confesses she would have taken the gig for 10 grand; Vanya smirkingly admits he could have gone as high as 30. On such a negotiation begins a whirlwind week of debauchery, peaking with an impulsive proposal and a rushed marriage in Las Vegas.

A fractured fairy tale

Anora is a fractured Cinderella tale, a cockeyed take on Pretty Woman. But where Pretty Woman glosses over the transactional nitty gritty of its central relationship, Anora revels in it: Ani is selling sex, Vanya is buying it. For a while, Vanya is selling a way out of Ani’s grubby world; and for a while, Ani buys what he’s selling.

And where Pretty Woman’s story ends with its two lovebirds flying towards each other on a fire escape, Anora’s real story is just beginning: Vanya’s parents hear about their dissolute son’s shameful union, and dispatches three goons to forcibly separate the newlyweds and have the marriage annulled.

Baker may be working from a prototypical story, but he breaks its mold at every turn. Ani may be a plaything, but she refuses to be discarded easily—she’s a doll made not of fragile porcelain but cold, hard plastic. And the three henchmen sent to break her are woefully not up to the task: There’s the fixer, Vanya’s put-upon godfather Toros (Karren Karagulian, who played a cabbie with niche sexual preferences in Tangerine) and his bumbling brother Garnik (Vache Tovmasyan). Of the trio, it is the oddly decorous Igor—the muscle of the operation—who seems to have Ani’s number. Yura Borisov’s quietly observant performance gives Mikey Madison a foil to work against; his Igor is the film’s secret weapon.

Meeting the real Ani

Anora hits its screwball peak when Ani and Vanya’s goons first collide. They arrive at the mansion barely giving Vanya’s new bride a second glance, but after Vanya flees, Ani soon demonstrates that she is no Russian sex doll. She kicks and bites. She tears the living room apart defending herself and her rights as Vanya’s bride. It’s a set piece that skates on the outer edge of hysteria, somehow made more hilarious by its violence.

As the foursome trolls Manhattan and Coney Island looking for the errant Vanya—the actors delivering sterling ensemble work all the way—Anora sags a little under Baker’s prolix tendencies. The story loses a bit of its careening velocity as it gives you a deeper look at its colorful characters, as its relationships become deeper and its twists become darker. A part of you begins to wonder how Baker is going to land this baby.

Then Baker delivers a final scene you will never see coming, and Madison performs it with stunning aplomb. She knows the cards have been stacked against Ani from the very beginning; the tragedy of the gorgeously messy Ani is that she knows what will happen when she lets her guard down, but she did it anyway.

Anora ends with Ani ferociously grabbing that one last note of grace. And you will leave the theatre marveling—maybe even slightly discomfited—at how Baker and Madison managed to pull off that corkscrew twist in tone; how a New York odyssey that made you laugh with its characters can also make you mourn for the marginalized stripper at its heart.

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Anora opens Wednesday, January 22, exclusively at Ayala cinemas.