By james art Anora (2024 | USA | 140 mins | Sean Baker)
Sean Baker launches a rocket of delirious romance that can’t last when a private dancer gets the ultimate girlfriend experience with a funny young heir to a Russian oligarch. In this case, it’s Annie (short for Anora), an erotic dancer at a decently upscale Manhattan club, played with immense depth and magnetic dexterity by Mikey Madison. In an opening sequence that takes us through the club floor, birthday dances, VIP experiences and the dressing room chatter between the dancers – with their friendships and petty rivalries – we get a glimpse of the whole scene. As in so many of his films with their focus on prostitutes, Baker doesn’t approach these women with dire pity, but as people with the skills and talent to make a living in a tough industry among consenting adults.
On this particular night, Annie’s dinner break is cut short by her boss’s demand that she and the conversational Russian she picked up from her grandmother talk to a rich kid named Vanya with more money than he knows what to do with. Played by Marc Eidelstein, in a goofy and phenomenal debut from a newcomer who will never shake the “Russian Timmy Chalamet” rap, he is instantly smitten with Annie. There is no sex in the champagne room, but even though this boy is twenty-one, going on thirteen, he knows to ask if Annie works outside the club.
From the moment she puts her number in his phone and rolls up to his (his father’s) palatial estate in Sheepshead, we’re right there with them at breakneck speed falling into something. Vanya is a jerk who takes off his clothes and does a naked backflip on his read velvet sheets before Annie gives him the “a little bit of everything” package, but he’s also cute enough to make his silly attempts at American idioms look charming. She returns the next day for a private dance and a gentle encouraging reminder that he’s only used fifteen minutes of his time, bunny-rabbit style, but the care with which she handles it speaks for a true professional.
Madison plays twenty-three-year-old Annie as at least a little wise beyond her years; she knows her price, but she is not yet exhausted by her work. Presented in candy-colored cinematography, the opening act conveys the joys of being young, rich and horny. Annie’s intelligence, but a series of knock-knock parties, Coney Island bakeries, a spontaneous escape on a private jet to a fully stocked apartment in Vegas, and an ill-advised proposal even make her put aside her sensibilities and venture into the fantasy of something more. As the soundtrack drops the needle on Robin Schulz and Callum Scott’s simmering electro reworking of “Greatest Day,” as the young couple celebrates under the Fremont Street Experience’s digital fireworks (downtown Las Vegas has never looked more romantic or less sad), you you’re right with Annie as she falls for the lottery ticket fantasy of spending her life banging a skinny billionaire, whose days are otherwise occupied with weed, video game missions, and avoiding going back to work for his father’s rogue enterprise.
Before domestic bliss can set in, however, there’s an inevitable crash to reality when news of their union comes back to mother Russia. It’s when the grown-ups arrive in the form of a trio of fixers (Karen Karagulyan as a high-ranking Armenian on perpetual nanny duty, Vache Tovmasyan as his hapless sidekick and the lovely Yura Borisov as the on-duty gopnik with a heart of gold) that the film’s mode makes a giant side-step from euphoria to Uncut gemstones pressure cooker level. The film finds heart-wrenching comedy in their manic, high-stress quest across Brighton Beach to undo the idiocy of a runaway rich kid with no regard for the consequences of their actions. Throughout, Baker’s sympathies lie with the workers left to sort out huge messes for helpless oligarchs. During twenty-four hours of catastrophe, their cruel indifference became more apparent in the cold light of day. Everyone in the cast is great, but Mikey Madison is a force of nature. From her first dance to her unwavering final scene, she gives us the whole world.
Anora arrives in Seattle theaters on November 1
An earlier version of this review ran when Anora had its US premiere at the 2024 Telluride Film Festival.