Sometimes a movie actually earns the old cliché of a “star-making turn,” and I’m here to say that Sean Baker’s “Anora” is this year’s star maker. I’ve seen it twice, and both times I left the theater on a high, exhilarated by the performances, the rhythm, the emotional shape of it. The only question that remains — and it’s a great one to have to ask — is exactly whose star “Anora” will make.
One obvious (and obviously correct) answer is Mikey Madison, who plays the titular character. Madison is no newcomer; she played Sadie, a Manson family member, in Quentin Tarantino’s “Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood”; and Pamela Adlon’s oldest daughter, Max, on the terrific FX show “Better Things.”
Madison has always been good, an ingénue with extraordinarily expressive features who can play bratty and naïve at the same time. But this role requires her to go for broke, with elements of slapstick, romance, comedy and tragedy, along with dancing in skimpy or nonexistent clothing and throwing a couple of powerful punches. Playing Anora called for both an emotionally rich inner life and a breathtakingly kinetic physicality, all poured into a character about whom people form opinions the moment they meet her. And at every moment, Madison is mesmerizing.
The movie is also a star maker for Baker, whose earlier films, like “The Florida Project” and “Red Rocket,” have earned accolades and devoted audiences. With “Anora,” though, he has leveled up. (The film won the coveted Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival in May.)
Baker is known for making movies about people on society’s margins, frequently sex workers. But this film, which Baker directed, wrote and edited, is steadier and more confident than his previous work. In some ways “Anora” has the most in common with Baker’s 2015 film, “Tangerine,” a screwball comedy about transgender sex workers in Los Angeles, shot on iPhones. But it also feels like a significant evolution in his style, and makes me excited to see what he does next.
Ani — Anora prefers the diminutive of her name — is a stripper at a Midtown Manhattan club, and she takes clients on the side as an escort, too. She lives in Brighton Beach, one of Brooklyn’s southernmost neighborhoods, populated largely by Russian and other Eastern European communities, and has an accent to match. Ani speaks passable Russian because, as she tells a new client at the club, her grandmother never learned English.
That new client is Ivan (a fantastic and frenetic Mark Eydelshteyn), who also has a nickname, Vanya, and looks about 15 years old. He says he’s 21. He’s also loaded when he meets Ani at the club, in more ways than one. This guy is rich, and Ani doesn’t bother to ask about the source of his wealth until after she visits him at his palatial home in south Brooklyn, which overlooks the water. (The movie never specifies the location, but it appears to be in Mill Basin.)
When Ani asks Vanya how he has this incredible home, he waffles and jokes in his halting English but eventually reveals that his father is a very powerful and wealthy man in Moscow. “Google him,” Vanya says, and then watches as her eyes grow wide.
Vanya is paying Ani generously for exuberant sex, and he gives off the air of someone who is used to handing money to people, so much that he barely thinks of those relationships as transactional at all. She likes him.
Ani is not the type to be cowed by money; she is a cool businesswoman with a proper appreciation for what cash can mean, and unabashedly asks for what she is due for services rendered. Vanya, though, just wants to party with his friends, some of whom are also wealthy Russian scions and some of whom are just local kids. Vanya is enraptured by Ani, and pays her to move into his mansion for a week and be his girlfriend. She haggles, then agrees. The look in her eyes suggests she’s not entirely sure this is just a business deal.
“Anora” is split into three acts, each of which works inside its own genre, something borrowed and updated from classic Hollywood. The first act is a romance that feels like a younger, more explicit take on “Pretty Woman,” or maybe just a fairy tale: the local girl and the little prince. Act II is a frantic screwball comedy with many predecessors, most recently “Uncut Gems”: a set-piece-laden romp through New York with expertly funny timing and a few pratfalls. And the final act — well, I’ll let you find that out on your own.
That these three slide effortlessly into one another is a marvel of filmmaking and acting. Madison and Eydelshteyn have gorgeous, effervescent chemistry that walks a tricky line as the story progresses. When Vanya’s father’s goons show up (played by Karren Karagulian, Vache Tovmasyan and the truly excellent Yura Borisov), the threads of their luxurious union start to fray. This is a love story, but a complicated one, and now the seams show.
And soon we’re off through south Brooklyn, on streets recognizable mostly to those of us who have spent a lazy summer day on the Coney Island boardwalk. It’s winter in this movie, so it’s a different view of the place, empty and chilly. This is the New York that doesn’t always make it into the movies, desperately beautiful and also teeming with chaos.
At one point, characters walk, or really stalk, down the boardwalk as night falls. In the distance you can see a thick band of orange sunset hanging low over the horizon, the iconic Parachute Jump ride outlined against the fiery sky. It’s more beautiful than you can imagine.
We don’t really get much back story on anyone in this film, at least not outright. Instead, Baker relies on small, almost undetectable touches to lend dimension to his easily caricatured players. The music plays a role — great big pulsing club tracks that give us the interior lives of the characters. Often the music slips from diegetic to non-diegetic and back again, meaning the music belongs to their world and to ours; we’re coaxed into the story, part of it.
There are wardrobe choices, too: Ani, for instance, becomes progressively more clothed as her character gradually becomes more vulnerable. Her development is all behind the eyes. At times her face is shot in the center of the screen, filling the frame, the way you’d see a starlet in an old Hollywood romance.
“Anora” is a bawdy modern fable, populated by strippers and strongmen and brutes. Like most of Baker’s movies, it is, at its core, about the limits of the American dream, the many invisible walls that stand in the way of fantasies about equality and opportunity and pulling yourself up by your bootstraps. This is a story of wealth, and power, and what love can and can’t overcome. But it’s also about something far more heart-rending: what it means to be accustomed to being looked at one way, and then experiencing, out of the blue, what it feels like to actually be seen.
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