Mikey Madison lets out her most heartfelt scream at Anora – The Globe and Mail

Mikey Madison really knows how to scream. c Once upon a time in Hollywood (2019) and screams (2022), she does it with her whole body, with sustained pitch, with stunning sound until her characters’ last breath, even as they die in flames. As Max, the eldest daughter in the F/X series Better thingsMadison perfected a whimpering, seven-syllable “mommy,” equal parts rebuke and demand. Now, in her new film, Anorashe plays the title character, an exotic dancer who talks rough but has learned the hard way to only scream on the inside.

Anora “Annie” Mikheeva lives by the subway in the Russian neighborhood of Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, where she works at a glitzy gentlemen’s club with bottles. Backstage, her co-stars swap stories about the men who pay them for lap dances – “He said I looked like his 18-year-old daughter, then he bought five songs” – but on the floor, they perform a perfect obedience, a fantasy for woman want their clients.

Because Annie speaks Russian, she is chosen to serve Ivan (Vanya) Zakharov (Mark Eidelstein), a brash teenager who is the son of an incredibly wealthy Russian oligarch. He invites her to his bloated mansion (filmed in the home of a real oligarch), pays her for sex (she discreetly sneers at how quickly she cums), and continues to pay her to be his “horny girlfriend.” For a while, Annie’s cynicism remains—she’s going to get everything she can out of this kid—but after a ride on a private jet to a lavish apartment in Las Vegas, Vanya proposes.

It’s one of the film’s central scenes, and Madison pulls it off. “You mean this?” – she continues to ask Vanya as the camera pans around their hotel bed. “But you average that?” The audience holds its breath as this girl – this light girl who knows better because she knows this type of man – falls in love with the fairy tale.

“He bets more than what he pays her for the week. It’s all in her face,” Madison, 25, said in a joint interview with her writer/director Sean Baker at the Toronto International Film Festival in September, where Anora was named second runner-up for the People’s Choice Award. “The life he has is one she would kill for.”

But for Annie, it’s not just about the lifestyle – she’s also risking her heart. “She gives up,” says Baker, “to a boy who is 100 percent ignorant of her hopes and dreams. It’s a tragic moment for me. I have heard the audience clap their hands as Annie and Vanya run towards the Little White Chapel. I almost want to yell, ‘Don’t cheer for that!'” As you might have guessed, the princess moment didn’t last.

Annie is the latest in Sean Baker’s series of characters – Sin-Dee Rella, the transgender sex worker in Tangerine; Hallie, the single mom living in a crappy motel in the shadow of Disney World The Florida Project – who are resilient but rejected by society as less than. “I’m interested in the way they have to fight to be seen, to get the respect they deserve,” says Baker. “I think that’s what makes a strong protagonist: someone the audience can see deserves respect, so let’s root for her.”

Anoralike much of Baker’s work, is an on-the-spot study of what economic inequality really feels like—the behavior that wealth tolerates and isolates people, and its victims, who are left to pick up the pieces after hours when their victimization has continued forward. “Look at the class divide in the US, in the world, it’s only growing,” Baker says. “It’s impossible to ignore, and if you do, it’s almost irresponsible. It is important to discuss this topic. But I don’t want to preach; that divides people. I just want to get the discussion out there.”

A few years ago, Baker “tried the Hollywood way” of filmmaking by buying producers an earlier version of a script set in Brighton Beach. “The moment they read it, they were like, ‘We’re going to get Ryan Gosling, Tom Hardy, they’re going to do Russian accents.’ I’m like, ‘No! This is not the way I want to make movies!’” He prefers to work independently to retain control over the story and casting.

For AnoraBaker employed a mix of trained actors and Brighton Beach locals (including some of the strippers), many Russian or Armenian, including his frequent collaborator Karen Karagulyan. Karagulyan plays Toros, an employee who works for Vanya’s parents; along with two henchmen, he spends the second half of the film trying to get Annie to go away. “I wanted a diverse team where everyone was at a different level in the hierarchy,” says Baker. “I wanted to explore that power dynamic, how one treats someone on the rung right below them.”

This leads to the film’s other central scene: an extended comic battle where Annie faces off against Toros and his thugs. This is her chance to unleash the inner scream she has been suppressing. “It was important for me to do my own stunts, to feel the things that Annie feels, so there was no pretense,” says Madison, who speaks softly and precisely. “But it’s not something you can practice. Annie is very different from me. She is always ready for battle. She doesn’t stop to think about what she says, she just says it. I constantly put a lot of energy into playing it.

The scene I can’t get out of my head is earlier, where Annie performs a sexy dance for Vanya as he lounges on the plush sofa in his huge living room. She’s dressed in black leather sexshop clothes, writhing on the floor all the way, bumping her hips against each other, then spreading them wide. He scrolled through his phone without looking at her. She’s just another thing he’s bought, another toy he’s already tired of. Makes me want to scream.

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