‘Anora’ Review: Sean Baker’s Exuberant Tragicomedy Places Class in Its Cross Hairs

The eponymous character of Anora, a feisty 23-year-old Brooklyn sex worker, lives the sort of hardscrabble and precarious life that writer-director Sean Baker has vigorously tracked across his work. But while Baker’s protagonists are typically mired in the same place, Ani (Mikey Madison), as Anora emphatically prefers to be called, manages to escape the familiar, and crash through the class divide with all the subtlety of a wrecking ball. Her quixotic quest to remain among Russian oligarchs is a riotously funny neorealist farce that will be familiar to fans of Tangerine and Red Rocket, though at times it feels like the rougher edges of Baker’s vision have been smoothed out in the interest of driving home an easily digestible allegory.

We meet Ani inside the strip club where she works as a dancer, an environment that she manages an impressive level of control over. She easily seduces the wealthy patrons into VIP lap dances and more or less makes her own schedule, righteously invoking worker’s rights when facing pushback from her easily swayed boss (Vincent Radwinsky). “Once you give me health insurance and a 401K, then you can tell me when I work,” she argues when lobbying for time off.

Ani is looking for any chance to move up in the world, and it arrives in the form of Ivan Zakharov (Mark Eydelshteyn), the 21-year-old son of a Russian billionaire who walks into the club and is paired with Ani because she speaks his mother tongue. Immediately infatuated with Ani, Ivan woos her with his money, and a whirlwind courtship ensues. Beginning with regular dates to the lavish mansion where he resides, Ivan then hires Ani to be his girlfriend for a week and, while on a spur-of-the-moment trip to Las Vegas, proposes and immediately seals the deal at the Little White Wedding Chapel. It’s the American dream in the age of late-stage capitalism.

Anora’s initial pull lies in the way that Baker intoxicatingly keys his aesthetic to the fervor of Ani and Ivan’s budding romance, with Drew Daniels’s camera giddily swirling to and fro and dance-pop tunes intermittently flooding the soundtrack. So intoxicating, in fact, that we start to think that the spark between the two might actually grow into a full-fledged romance. It’s clear that things won’t go well for them, as the entitled Ivan, whose entire American sojourn is bankrolled by his father, sees Ani as a momentary amusement, like one of his video games, and as a fast track to a green card. But Ani’s youthful naïvete is such that she seems to believe that she has control over this situation, or at least that she’s on equal standing with Ivan.

Upon returning to New York, word of the nuptials spreads and, in short order, a small army of Russians heads to Ivan’s mansion to confirm the horror of the improper coupling. Being the brat that he is, Ivan flees the scene, leaving Ani in the custody of his parents’ Armenian fixer, Toros (Baker regular Karren Karagulian), and the man’s two stooges, Garnick (Vache Tovmasyan) and Igor (Yura Borisov), as they begin a frantic search for him in order to get the marriage annulled before his parents arrive the next day. Anora kicks into full comedic gear at this point, beginning with a slapstick sequence where the newly stranded Ani inflicts some real physical damage on Garnick, Igor, and the mansion itself as she tries to get the intruders to leave.

When they finally overpower her and drag her along on a journey through Ivan’s regular haunts, Ani holds on to her status as Ivan’s wife with an iron grip and never ceases to act like the boss, resulting in hilarious bickering with her hapless captors. Baker’s class commentary is at its sharpest here, with both Ani and Toros attempting to impose their supposed power over one another while on the hunt for a person who in reality owns them both. Over the course of the night, this motley crew gradually forms a kind of begrudging respect for one another, or at least an understanding of each other’s level of subservience within the Zakharov hierarchy. “As much as he fucked you,” Toros explodes at one point to Ani, “he fucked me worse!”

Baker’s portrayal of class, privilege, and more is so clear-eyed that it comes as a disappointment how Anora settles into a crowd-pleasing mode for its final act. Not that the film ends happily, but once Ivan is located and his parents, the nonchalant Nikolai (Aleksey Serebryakov) and cold-as-steel Galina (Darya Ekamasova), arrive on the scene, Anora somewhat defaults to doling out catharsis to its characters, which feels incongruous with Baker’s otherwise live-wire naturalism. Even the bittersweet final moment, when Ani finally drops her hardened defense mechanisms as the realization of her total lack of control in the face of the upper echelons of society fully hits her, is something that feels contrived for maximum audience sympathy.

Still, Anora is propulsive and entertaining through and through. Even if her character isn’t afforded the depth of Baker’s previous protagonists, that’s no fault of Madison, who whips up a deliriously captivating whirlwind of expletive-laden Brooklyn attitude. As the film progresses, it doesn’t uncover new layers of the character, and as such Ani comes to feel like a colorful cypher being pushed through the orchestrations of the plot. Maybe that’s by design—a reflection of what Baker sees as the powerlessness of the underclass—but it also means that Ani, despite her brash deportment, continually behaves in all the ways that we expect her to. And if it is by design, then the film’s disappointment is closer to an ultimate sadness, at it views its central figure through the same surface-level lens of the ruling class that it aims to condemn.