Sean Baker sees the world differently. He found a magic kingdom in the pastel purple of The Florida Project’s multi-storey inn. Made a washed-up porn star an avatar for the American Dream in Red Rocket. Set Tangerine’s frenzied tale of a transgender woman’s revenge against the glittering backdrop of Christmas Eve. And now in Anora, his Palme d’Or-winning odyssey, turns Take That’s ‘Greatest Day’ — a song largely adored by a mum demographic — into a sex-worker anthem.
It makes for one hell of an opening sequence: Gary Barlow and co’s hopeful lyrics about shared vitality (remixed to a club beat) scoring a line-up of athletic strippers, their customers barely visible beneath them. “Watch the world come alive tonight… Stay close to me.” At the end of the undulating chorus line twirls Mikey Madison’s Ani (short for Anora), smiling serenely, long, dark hair cascading around her, focused on the task in hand.
The following act treads a similar tone to Lorene Scafaria’s slick yet tender Hustlers; like Constance Wu’s newbie Destiny, Ani works the room — albeit at a more confident tempo — flashing a broader, fixed smile, pouncing at the sign of opportunity, and fielding distasteful comments from her clients (“Does your family know that you do this?”). Baker shades in her character in the moments between her private dances, of which there are at least six; Ani evaluating the crowd, comparing nail patterns over a cigarette with her colleague, and in spite of her lucrative night, eating a basic dinner out of Tupperware. She’s driven and talented, yet the moneyed life she craves is still just out of reach. Until Ivan (Mark Eydelshteyn) walks in, a 21-year-old human puppy in garish leisurewear, whose designer sunglasses are as big as his need to rebel against his Russian oligarch father.
She may be in her early twenties but there’s an aspirational quality — something more assured than scrappiness — to the way that Ani asserts and carries herself in a world uninterested in giving her a fair deal.
Baker’s hands-on approach to casting always yields thrilling results (he’s credited as casting director on several of his films, including Anora), and here the bar has been raised even higher. Madison emerges from a background of solid secondary roles (a complicated teenage daughter in Pamela Adlon’s excellent show Better Things, a Manson girl in Once Upon A Time In Hollywood) as a blazing sun atop knee-high boots, complete with her own gravitational pull. Circumstance throws Ani and Ivan together — Ani is the only girl in the club who can speak Russian — but infatuation keeps him in her orbit, with Madison at the wheel, a paragon of charm, tenacity and savviness.
The last takes precedence in the film’s second half, when Ani and Ivan’s whirlwind, drug-bolstered romance climaxes in a Vegas wedding. Ani’s gigantic diamond ring has barely warmed on her finger before the new in-laws’ henchmen arrive, on strict instruction to annul the marriage. It’s here that Anora momentarily loses its footing: in the wake of a furiously funny set-piece that sees Ani whip Tasmanian Devil-style around Ivan’s overthrown home comes a long, mood-dampening hunt for the spineless Ivan, who has abandoned his new wife. Location always plays a distinct role in Baker’s work (The Florida Project’s aforementioned purple inn, Tangerine’s sunset-kissed Hollywood), but this feels like a needless pivot from plot to place as Ani and the admittedly hysterically funny trio of hired hands stumble around wintery Coney Island. Anora is only slightly longer than Baker’s last film, Red Rocket, but it’s in this wayward stretch that you feel the film’s 139-minute runtime could be mercifully crunched.
It’s when Ani retrieves some agency that the film rolls back on track, which is both a testament to Madison’s watchability and the strength of the character. One henchman, the perpetually uncomfortable yet affable Igor (Yura Borisov, a revelation), barely conceals his admiration for the sparky young woman in his company, and you feel right there with him. She may be in her early twenties but there’s an aspirational quality — something more assured than scrappiness — to the way that Ani asserts and carries herself in a world uninterested in giving her a fair deal. Baker has the utmost talent of giving characters rooted on the periphery their own valiant trajectory (perhaps with the exception of Simon Rex’s slippery Red Rocket protagonist), and Ani is his biggest triumph yet. Not all heroes wear capes, but some have been known to don towering stripper heels. Which are much harder to pull off.
