'Anora' is the Movie of the Year
Sean Baker does brutally realistic 'Pretty Woman' in Brighton Beach. Give them all the awards.
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Sean Baker seems to have found the skeleton key to unlocking a whole new universe of stories heretofore unexplored by other filmmakers, and that skeleton key is “treating sex workers like people.” He’s arguably not the first to do it, but no one else has so successfully made it their “brand.” Baker’s latest, Anora is such an unqualified masterpiece that it feels like the coronation of basically everything he’s been doing for the last 15 years.
If 2021’s Red Rocket was the sex worker A Star Is Born (aka A Star Is Porn, I’m sure I used that one already), Anora is equally sloganeerable as the brutally realistic Pretty Woman. Red Rocket starred Simon Rex, in the pinnacle example of stunt casting gone right, as a down-on-his-luck porn star who finds and grooms his ultimate meal ticket in a Gulf Coast strip mall. Anora stars Mikey Madison, who’s so convincing that it feels like the first time we’re seeing her, another in a long line of Sean Baker’s previously unknowns (like Suzanna Son as “Strawberry” in Red Rocket). Yet Madison has been around, with a solid television resume, a major role in Scream 5, and a cameo as Susan Adkins in Tarantino’s Once Upon A Time in Hollywood. (It was reportedly her turn in Scream 5 that convinced Baker to make her his lead).
It’s just that Baker, as he so often does, gets a performance out of Madison that no one else has. Madison doesn’t feel like Julia Roberts riffing on Hollywood’s light rom-com conception of “a hooker,” she feels like Baker spent years discovering an escort with stage presence. There are stories about Andre Royo getting shooed away from the craft services table on the set of The Wire, because in his Bubbles makeup, he was just too convincing as a homeless heroin addict. Anora has the same feeling, of a movie finding a level of realism that our previous lifetime of media consumption hasn’t quite prepared us for. The verisimilitude of the performance isn’t just a check box either, it makes every scene crackle with volatility. When you live your life in this sort of legal gray area, you might wake up in jail or in a castle — a thrilling, terrifying ride.
Madison plays Annie, working at a Brighton Beach strip club one night when the manager seeks her out because he needs a girl with a particular skill: someone who can speak Russian, as requested by a high roller. The high roller turns out to be Ivan Zakharov, the shitty Zoomer son of a Russian oligarch. Annie and Ivan, aka Vanya, bond immediately over both being a little embarrassed to speak the other’s language.
Ivan has the cash to buy Annie’s undivided attention and Annie has the skill to keep it. He pays for more and more dances, then a house call, and eventually the full girlfriend experience. He’s quickly cuntstruck, while Annie is equally awed by Ivan’s seemingly unlimited access to wealth and influence. Penthouse suites, private jets, an army of servants constantly at his beck and call — this little dude is living out Annie’s wildest materialist dreams. The workingest girl meets the idlest boy. Is Annie truly in love or just thrilled at having found the whale of every escort’s fantasies? The importance of the distinction seems to fade with every new indulgence.
Ivan is played by Mark Eydelshteyn, so convincing as a pimply, videogames-obsessed Zoomer mop that he’s easily confused for previously undiscovered talent. Anora is his first English role, but it turns out he’s actually a product of the Russian theater, already dubbed “the Russian Timothee Chalamet” by his home country’s media. Recommended by an Anora co-star who had already been cast, Eydelshteyn reportedly sent Baker a self-filmed audition tape performed in the nude while reading the script and vaping. Baker was sold, and it’s easy to see why. Eydelshteyn’s Ivan is the perfect fuckhead, lounging around a mansion in idiotic-looking designer clothes while servants vacuum around him and he ignores his sex worker girlfriend to play video games. He manages to embody a universal arrogance of youth, by being its most extreme form.