Is five stars enough? The only remaining thing to discuss about Anora (2024) – otherwise watched, dissected, praised, marvelled over by a hundred previous critics – is what kind of incendiary speech Sean Baker will make at the Oscars. This film delivers both the director and star Mikey Madison elegantly into mainstream cinema and cuts deep into a world hidden from view – a world of humour and horror, love and business, wealth – and pain.
Anora (preferring, notably, to be called Ani) works at a high-end strip club in New York. Her life turns on a dime – and the promise of ten thousand dollars – when Vanya, a spoiled Russian oligarch’s brat, buys her as his girlfriend for a week. Desperation clings to the surface of Ani’s world. The girls fight over their rich clients. They suck compulsively on vapes. They crash at home, broken by exhaustion. It’s a world placed firmly in the modern day, from the vaping to the social media to the furious conversations over the phone between people five thousand miles apart.
Of course it’s a cautious joy at first – Ani now gets to live in a house the size of a football pitch, gets to eat the best food and go wild in Vegas with her peevish, baby-faced boyfriend and his endless supply of money and influence. But it can’t last. Her buyer isn’t Richard Gere – he’s a selfish, gruesomely hedonistic child, and Anora (2024) spits in the face of Pretty Woman (1993) and steals its lunch money. This isn’t that kind of film. When Vanya’s parents send in their enforcers to tear the couple apart by any means necessary, we dive into the underworld of New York in a manic, sleep-deprived rollercoaster of a narrative. And we get under Ani’s skin with the muted precision of a master director at work.
Sean Baker first made waves with Tangerine (2015), a similarly rollercoaster-like story of a transgender prostitute combing the Los Angeles nightlife for her cheating pimp-boyfriend, shot on smartphones and a shoestring budget. Anora (2024) is a close relation, with a budget sixty times the size and ambitions far beyond its sibling. Baker doesn’t make leery, voyeuristic films. He’s interested in the marginalised lives of sex workers, their hopes and struggles – not just their bodies. His breakout film was The Florida Project (2017), a wonderful documentary-style insight into poverty-stricken communities on the outskirts of Disneyland, clinging to the park’s economy in a brightly-painted bid for survival. Sean Baker has honest and incisive interest in the marginalised; he brings sex workers, thieves, bodyguards and service workers centre stage and coaxes the audience into their world in a way no other working director does.
And finally back to Anora (2024). It’s wonderful. It’s shocking, and energetic, and revealing like nothing else released this year. Mikey Madison is brilliant as a character who just won’t let herself be defined, or denigrated, or reduced to a prop by the characters trying to use and abuse her. Mark Eidelstein slips under the radar but excellently humanises the spoiled child ruined by wealth and entitlement, whose miserable hedonism pulls the story ever-forward. The colourful cast of Russian enforcers aren’t comic relief or snarling monsters either. In that constant Sean Baker way, their bumbling desperation is explored with as much seriousness as Ani’s own inner pain. By the end of the film, some of these peripheral characters have quietly ascended to the role of protagonist – and it’s a real moment of awe when the audience realises it too.
The final moments of a film matter most. Anora (2024) delivers, as the marginalised move to the centre, the internal heartbreak finally becomes external, and we end on a moment of horrible uncertainty. That brilliant ending strangely evokes Billy Wilder’s classic The Apartment (1960), with a cold shock of unromantic realism, and a real, painful lack of closure. It’s the ideal ice water to pour on such a fired-up film.
Oh, and the soundtrack leans heavily on Take That’s noughties banger, ‘Greatest Day’. You can watch it for that reason alone.
Still: Universal Pictures