The synopsis of Sean Baker’s “Anora,” winner of the Palme d’Or at Cannes this year, describes one more spin on the “Cinderella story” — this time as a sex-work dramedy. But underneath the film’s fantasy is a hard-hitting commentary on the intractable gaps between different social classes.
Ani (Mikey Madison), short for Anora, works at a strip club where she is asked to entertain Ivan (Mark Eydelshteyn) — an obscenely wealthy Russian twenty-something — because she’s the only worker there who speaks his language. Ivan, or Vanya, as his friends call him, takes a liking to Ani and pays her for sex outside of the club, whisking her away into a world of luxury and increasingly larger commitments: first a week of being his “temporary girlfriend,” then a shocking marriage proposal.
If Ivan’s request is a passageway to fantasy, it’s also a descent into hell, as news of their marriage quickly spreads to his oligarch parents who can scarcely believe their ears. As expected, the Cinderella fantasy was just that — a fantasy — as Ani, who quit her job after the engagement, finds herself amidst a deep predicament and a world for which she is wholly unprepared.
If there is a throughline across “Anora’s” quick-paced 139-minute runtime, it’s one of overstimulation. In the sanguine first part of the film, this stimulation is spurred on by a drug-fueled hodgepodge of flashing club lights, bass-forward club mixes and obscene displays of opulence. Those elements are all brought together through abrupt and rapid cuts, which are more reminiscent of what one might find in an action film than any of Baker’s previous work. Days are condensed into minutes, minutes are crammed into seconds, and “Anora” consistently moves onto the next scene before you can process the last.
When the carefree edifice of this first section crumbles in the face of reality — Ivan’s parents find out about the marriage and make it their mission to get it annulled — one might expect the film to slow down and gather itself in a return to the “real world.” Instead, if anything, “Anora” somehow kicks it up a further notch, introducing a trio of henchmen named Toros (Karren Karagulian), Garnick (Vache Tovmasyan) and Igor (Yura Borisov) who are tasked with breaking up the happy couple.
The introduction of Toros and company turns into an outpouring of comic violence as Ani punches, kicks and headbutts her way against the three men trying to keep her down. Trading rapid cuts for extended sequences of screwball comedy, “Anora” transforms into a series of farcical and destructive set-pieces that use Madison’s impassioned physical performance as a trenchant example of Ani’s unshakeable willpower. Escalating outwards into an all-nighter odyssey through the bars and clubs in Brighton Beach and beyond, “Anora” crystallizes its form as an uneasy yet rollicking genre-piece whose entertainment is consistently matched by its emotional core.
If “Anora” morphs into something closer to the rapid-fire physical chaos of “His Girl Friday” than any of Baker’s more restrained earlier work, this is of course the point — the comedy acts as an illusion that the film dares you not to lift. By genre-shifting “Anora” into an action-screwball-comedy, Baker invites his audience to fall into the same sort of gleeful carefree romp that Ani and Vanya undergo in the first half of the film. We are led to believe, in spite of the increasingly precarious and unhinged circumstances of the plot, that things can (or should) be fun for these characters and, by proxy, ourselves, even as the fantasy unravels in front of our eyes.
This veil of entertainment lasts throughout nearly the entire film, even when the virtual specter of Ivan’s parents Nikolai (Aleksey Serebryakov) and Galina (Darya Ekamasova) materializes as they cross the ocean via private plane to settle the situation once and for all. Baker holds his foot on the gas pedal long and consistently enough to keep the precarity of Ani’s situation at the back of our mind, where heated dialogue registers as merely comic fodder, brushed away by another torrent of screams and insults from Ani’s thick Brooklyn accent. The frenetic pace of “Anora” is so persistent that Baker never allows the viewer to take a step back and pause to reflect on the brutality of the narrative’s state of affairs until it’s already far too late.
When the illusion eventually falls apart — amidst a return to the wreckage of Ivan’s (well, his parents’) mansion — Baker refocuses our attention on the role that class and labor have played in carving out and structuring this entire story in the first place. What separates Ani from Ivan is not that he’s paying her for sex work, but that she’s a worker. When things go wrong, he runs away on a drug-fueled bender before falling back into the arms of his parents. She has to find a job.
Out of this final attention to class comes another, more subtle point, that underlies the care and nuance with which Baker constructs this world. Toros, Garnick and especially Igor are workers too, even if their oligarch-employers have a bit more power and money than Ani’s boss at the strip club. The audience first sees Toros as a phone call interrupts his day-job of being a priest presiding over a baptism, and he repeats throughout the film that he will be the one “deep in shit” from Ivan’s wrathful parents if he doesn’t find him on time. Igor, who arguably comes to take on second-billing in the final act of the film, drives around in his grandmother’s car and reveals a tenderness and care for Ani’s situation, even as he was the one to initially tie her up (something Ani never forgets). Ani and the three henchmen have far more in common than any of them do with Ivan — unlike him, they are caught in a cycle of inevitability and inescapability, with no trust funds to fall back on.
The tragedy of the situation, exemplified by the film’s gut-wrenching final scene, is that Ani doesn’t know how to see solidarity even as it stares her in the face, confusing favors for transactions right up until the last moment of the film. If there’s anything to take away from “Anora” — beyond, of course, a great time — it’s this sobering portrayal of the way contemporary society turns everything into a transaction, pitting the working class against itself while letting people like Vanya run away from their own mess.
