Sean Baker’s Palme D’Or Winner Offers a Clear-Eyed Retelling of a Modern Fairy Tale.
DIRECTED BY SEAN BAKER / 2024
Anora is one of the year’s best films. It’s a funny, sexy, heartbreaking, clear-eyed rendition of the Cinderella story. A common woman is swept into the fairy-tale world of the uber-wealthy, but as in the real world, happily-ever-after for our princess-to-be might prove unattainable.
Anora — she prefers to be called Ani — is an exotic dancer and sex worker plying her trade in a New York City club. She’s played by Mikey Madison (Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood, 2022’s Scream). Because she has a background in the Russian language, Ani is summoned to service a high-rolling patron. This is Vanya, a 21-going-on-15-year-old scion of Russian oligarchs (Russian actor Mark Eidelstein). Vanya is immediately smitten by Ani and before long he is offering her $10,000 to be his exclusive companion for one week. She demands 15, which he happily pays.
During that week, Vanya, Ani, and a cadre of Vanya’s friends will take an impromptu trip to Las Vegas. While there, Ani and Vanya impulsively get married. Vanya does this to secure his green card and to prevent being sent back to Russia. Ani does so to secure her future. Maybe she really likes him, but this is still very much a marriage of convenience for her. Their nuptial bliss is short-lived, however, when word of this marriage reaches Vanya’s parents. They immediately dispatch some goons to get the marriage annulled while they depart for New York to retrieve their wayward son. Ani isn’t going to give up Vanya without a fight.
Ani isn’t just fighting for her marriage though. It’s unclear how much she likes Vanya. She likes him. She seems to enjoy spending time with him (she’s content to cuddle with him while he plays video games after they’ve been wed), but under other circumstances, it doesn’t seem like he would be the type she would marry. But the opportunity of living a fairy tale life is too good to pass up. And while Vanya is still emotionally a child especially compared to the more hardened Ani (“His room is down the hall, it’s the one with the rocket ships on the walls!” Ani is told), he still seems like a nice enough guy. Will their marriage last? Probably not, but it would probably go longer than the two weeks one of Ani’s co-workers gives it.
Ani is also fighting for respect. Vanya’s family continually insults and degrades her. Her job as a sex worker aggrieves them much more than the fact of the marriage itself. They call her a whore and accuse her of being a con artist and a thief. And he pushes back against this. She may not be perfect but she doesn’t deserve to be treated like garbage by people who have never spent any time with her. Ani isn’t filled with disgust about her chosen profession. She approaches it as just another job, albeit one that doesn’t have healthcare or a pension. One of the through-lines to Baker’s movies has been an attempt at de-stigmatizing sex work. Ani’s fierce insistence that she deserves respect follows that tradition.
Madison’s performance as Ani is spirited and energetic. She’s built up emotional walls, probably very necessary walls given her line of work, but little by little we see cracks in those walls even as she keeps trying to reinforce them. When those walls inevitably come crashing down, the resulting emotional release is raw and heartbreaking.
But the journey to that point is full of screwball energy. The extended sequence where the goons herd Ani around the city searching for Vanya (who flees at the mention of his parents’ arrival) has moments so broadly comic they would not feel out of place in a Howard Hawks comedy. Yet even as these guys get their comeuppance, one of the goons, Igor, begins to sense there is a sort-of solidarity between them and Ani. Both are being used as disposable tools by the likes of Vanya and his family and the family pays no care to the damage this adventure is inflicting on everyone involved. It is lucky for us that Sean Baker does care. He uses his movies to shed light on those that society might deem disposable or unworthy of consideration. (See: Tangerine, The Florida Project, Red Rocket, and others). He shows us that the only people without value are the ones who place no value on the lives of others.