'Anora' review: Mistress America
Sean Baker's latest is a powderkeg comedy with an astonishing lead performance
Chaos is a ladder, they1 say.
When the world around you is thrown into disarray, start climbing and see how high you get.
This could be a neat little summary of Sean Baker’s Anora, though it would be a disservice to this sprawling powderkeg of a movie to simplify it or tidy it up.
Baker’s films, while vastly different in subject matter, tend to hone in on hustlers on the margins of American society. They know their trade, they try to scrape by, and sometimes, they succeed.
This could also be a neat little summary of Ani (Mikey Madison), birth name “Anora,” but I really liked this movie, so I don’t want to cheapen it.
Ani is an exotic dancer in New York. We first meet her mid-dance at Headquarters, the club where she works. Baker envelops us in this world quickly, roving around with Ani through a rapid-fire series of customer and coworker interactions. She has her sales pitch down, and her private dance routine perfected. She has work friends and rivals, and a necessarily combative relationship with her boss. Overall, she seems like she’s getting along okay.
The ads said Anora was a love story, though, and Baker wastes little time getting to it. One day, Ani is told that there’s a VIP requesting someone who speaks Russian. As it happens, she does.
This client is Ivan (Mark Eydelshteyn), a carefree, spastic 21-year-old. He throws (and stuffs) his money around like it’s nothing, because it isn’t.
As Ani finds out through a series of increasingly intimate paid encounters with Ivan, he is the son of a Russian oligarch. He lives in a gated mansion with plush furnishings, a well-stocked kitchen, and a bunch of luxury cars he isn’t allowed to drive.
Ivan is completely smitten with Ani, sweeping her up into his world of mindless partying and spontaneous travel. He pays her $15,000 to spend an entire week with him, and whisks her and several of his friends off to Las Vegas on a whim. It’s there, in the bed of their suite, that he’s ready to take their transactional relationship to the next level. He abruptly proposes marriage; bewildered, Ani accepts.
This first third of Anora is romance as ketamine bump. Baker creates a neon-tinged fantasia of young love that yields an effortless, empty contact high. The days blur together just like the rowdy parties and the vigorous sex.
The 90 or so minutes that follow are a prolonged, inevitable hangover that stretches across one long day and night. When Ivan’s parents find out what he’s done, they sick his buffoonish caretakers (played by Karren Karagullan, Vache Tovmasyan, and Yura Borlsov) to set things right.
Their idea of a fix is to force Ani and Ivan to have their marriage annulled, hurriedly arranging with the family lawyer to get in front of a friendly judge and ram through the necessary paperwork. When confronted with this reality, Ivan flees the mansion and leaves his new wife to deal with the hired thugs.
Or, maybe a better way to put it is that he leaves them to deal with her. It takes all three of these men to contain her, and none of them escape unscathed. Eventually, all four agree it’s in everyone’s best interest to track Ivan down; they head out for a seemingly endless night of searching restaurants, clubs, or businesses that Ivan has been known to frequent.
Bridging the formal divide between Baker’s faux romantic fantasy and this hard-knock reality is Madison’s astonishing performance. Ani is a woman constantly negotiating an unpredictable reality; she has created a persona that is sweet yet removed, and that can turn boisterously confrontational the second she feels threatened.
It’s difficult to do what Madison does here, which is to show the gears of thought constantly turning without it feeling forced. Ani is performing, but she’s not trying to be an actor.
Eydelshteyn proves to be a great foil, his youthful physicality and boyish charm eventually yielding a glaring immaturity. You can’t have one without the other!
The rest of the ensemble is impressive too, giving performances that are loose and violently alive. Baker gives them all room to shine; his camera capturing and hurling memorable gestures and line deliveries at warp speed.
Anora runs for 2 hours and 20 minutes, and while it doesn’t have enough story to fill that time, it has more than enough hilariously specific character detail. It is a meandering comedic odyssey that is defiantly vulgar and bracingly earnest.
Anora is now playing in theaters.
That hot, conniving guy from Game of Thrones who was also in The Wire