Anora, or Ani, is a sex worker in the Headquarters club in New York. When she meets Vanya (Ivan) — the 21 year-old son of a powerful Russian oligarch — Ani’s basic proficiency of the Russian language and her charm is more than enough to captivate the boy that was already in a state of dollar and drug induced ecstasy.
Seizing a window of opportunity both bright and narrow, they will live an intense, but fleeting, moment together.
Winner of the Cannes Film Festival’s Palm d’Or in 2024, Anora is a crazy ride in the eternal present. The film’s excellent lead roles of Ani (Mikey Madison) and Vanya (Mark Eydelshteyn) in conjunction with the direction from Sean Baker skyrocketed Anora to a strong candidacy for the Oscars coming up in three weeks.
Madison first gained recognition for her role as Maxine Fox in the FX comedy series Better Things, then went on to play a Manson Family cult member in Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. The other lead Eydelshteyn, is relatively unknown, with his prior work including the Russian coming-of-age film The Land of Sasha.
If you suffer from acute second-hand embarrassment, the strange familiarity of Vanya’s happiness outbursts will make you want to scream and disappear from the cinema room. Paradoxically addictive feeling as it is though, the spectator is trapped in its ever-enforcing loop of embarrassment and admiration.
Unlike Pretty Woman the film doesn’t shy away from the reality of prostitution.
Director and screenwriter Baker intelligently resorts to a non-native English speakers’ innocence to break free from the language sacrifice committed in most comedy firms: the language being too eloquent for the time restrictions required by human brain processes. Inducing laughter in others is a delicate art which, in a significant amount relies upon the subject’s relatedness to everyday people, events, places or references more generally.
When a film aims at triggering that reaction in an environment (the story) that is not the subject’s own, it often needs to resort to the accurate and timely placement of words and phrases in the “boxing match” that every good conversation is.
In real life, the average speaker does not have the cognitive speed to find those magic words in the precise moment (i.e. when the impression caused is at its peak). In ‘Anora’ however, it is more a symbiosis with the relaxedness and ridiculousness of the situation which renders the dialogue hilariously funny.
Ani and Vanya make a one-week agreement, much like the seven days Edward (Richard Gere) and Vivian (Julia Roberts) agree to in Hollywood’s most successful sex worker relationship movie Pretty Woman. While there is still a strong romantic element in Anora, unlike Pretty Woman doesn’t shy away from the reality of prostitution.
We see Ani looking for sex just after sex, when Vanya is “busy” playing a video game. There is no need for explicit conversations about Ani’s childhood dreams as we have in Pretty Woman. Departing from the assumption that everyone has or had had a dream, our job is to learn what that is for Ani.
On the other hand, while loving Edward was too easy in Pretty Woman, doing so for Vanya looks a little more challenging on paper. Nonetheless, the audience gets to admire how this disgustingly rich kid plays it all along. The combination of youth, absence of responsibilities, and the access to virtually unlimited funds pus him in a position where it is just too easy to put people down.
Still, his treatment not only of Ani, but the receptionist in the Vegas hotel, the nurse that takes care of them in the hangover afternoons, and every other ‘subordinate’ they come across is, perfectly nice and admirable.
It must be highlighted the performance from Yura Borisov, who plays Igor, one of the brutes sent by Vanya’s family to terminate their relationship. Despite a highly finite dialogue, he magnificently incarnates the sharp contrast between the expected ruthlessness of his position, and the natural sweetness that emanates from him. As a reward he will be competing for the highly contested Best Supporting Actor prize in the upcoming Oscars ceremony.
Although the film does not have a strong explicit social dimension, it does touch some delicate issues. For example, the vulnerable situation that many sex workers suffer in the US (and worldwide), with no health insurance and no paid vacation, among other basic benefits, or the state of the apartment in which Ani and her family live next to the subway tracks.
Anora shows us that, even in the presence of the elephant in the room, the oncoming downfall, the announced tragedy, one might just ignore the unavoidable and live.
In opposition to a society that imposes the school of thought of perfect anticipation, risk-minimisation and inter-temporal optimisation, it encourages us to “just go chill in my mansion or whatever”.
Main image supplied.
