This isn’t your typical Cinderella story. Sean Baker’s Anora is realistic, gritty, and unexpectedly amusing.
Anora Review
Rom-coms are like theatrical comfort food or a warm blanket on a cold day. They follow predictable patterns and everything works out for the best by the end. There is nothing wrong with that, after all who doesn’t want to live happily ever after? I’m a born and raised Disney girl so I default to that in spite of my familiarity with reality. Doing a brief glance at the synopsis, I chalked Anora up to being a new Pretty Woman, but it most definitely is not. It may share some bare bones with the Julia Roberts’ film but director and writer Sean Baker isn’t interested in suspended reality or perfect endings. This film shows us just how anxious, stressful, and chaotic relationships truly can be.
Baker is known for taking the marginalized and placing them center stage, to tell stories that other films wouldn’t dare or at the very least wouldn’t do so with any type of care given to its subjects. His characters are allowed to be real and move within realities that mirror true life as closely as a Hollywood film can get. Like Tangerine and The Florida Project, Anora is no different, only this time he is focusing on the women who make a living as sex workers. Anora is realistic, gritty, and unexpectedly funny although it goes on too long for me and has an ending I saw coming as soon as the romance fell apart.
Anora (Mikey Madison) or Ani as she prefers, is a young sex worker from Brooklyn who meets and falls into a whirlwind romance with Ivan (Mark Eidelshtein), the son of an oligarch. High on a cocktail of drugs, money, and alcohol, the two end up in Vegas and get married. Everything is going well until Ivan’s parents hear about his impromptu wedding. They decide to come to New York City in order to get their son an annulment and take his partying *ss home. But Ani won’t go quietly into the night and her lack of cowering to their demands leads to a night crammed into a SUV with the family’s muscle: Toros (Karren Karaguilan), Garnick (Vache Tovmasyan), and Igor (Yea Borisov).
When the rug gets pulled out from under Anora and Ivan that’s when the movie really picks up. The entire second act has no business being as hilarious as it is, especially when it is equally stressful and tense, but it ended up being the best part of the film for me. Without giving too much away, Anora ends up being dragged all over town by the family’s goons in an effort to track down the wayward husband. (Pretty sure Prince Charming wouldn’t bail on Cindy like that) None of the guys are all that bad. Toros is stern and a realist. Garnick is just trying to survive the night. While Igor is quiet and thoughtful. All of them, Ani included, are at the whims of the rich, something they all realize at one point or another. This foursome of enemies turned co-workers must deal with one impossible situation after the next. At one moment they are united in their distaste for walking in the cold or breaking glass to get answers, the next they are back to screaming at each other to shut up. It’s like watching the most dysfunctional office mates try to impress the CEO and their butting heads chemistry is off the charts.
Although it is being compared to Pretty Woman, Ani is no Vivian. She isn’t looking to be saved by a rich man. She also isn’t naive about the world around her or her place in it. Ani is calculating, headstrong, and makes no apologies for her line of work. Madison gives an effective performance and one that could see her winning big during the awards season, even if her New York accent grated all of my nerves. Her supporting cast of misfits are entertaining in their own right, with Borisov leading the way with his sad old dog eyes. Eidelshtein reminded me of B-rad from Malibu’s Most Wanted without any of the charm, which is exactly what this character called for. You want him to get his butt handed to him because he is just that annoying.
Cinematographer Drew Daniels’ sweeps the camera around to further enhance the pacing that oozes tension of this love story gone wrong. In the beginning, the camerawork captures the feeling of being young, carefree, and high all the time as these characters make one bad choice after another. Then, Baker and Daniels switch their gaze in timing with the genre shift that drives home that this isn’t your mother’s Cinderella story. In any other hands, this story would’ve soured quickly but Baker is adept at keeping us engaged (mostly) until the end.
Verdict
Anora is realistic, gritty, and unexpectedly funny. Baker has a keen eye for sharing stories that most would never tell while never demeaning the subjects of them. Underneath its glitter highlights and g-strings, Anora is a story about classism. power dynamics, and yes finding that someone/something you have been searching for, all told through the lens of a sex worker’s too good to be true romance. Being successful, finding love, can happen but it hardly ever looks like what society (and Hollywood) shows us through its meticulously curated filters.
Neon will release Anora in select theaters October 25 and others afterwards. It is rated R for strong sexual content throughout, graphic nudity, pervasive language, and drug use with a runtime of 138 minutes.
