SEAN BAKER'S (AND MIKEY MADISON'S) ANORA

 

Way back in May it was that Patty, Emma and I drove to the SEE Film Multiplex in Bremerton to take in I Saw the TV Glow, and while there I took a pic and linked the theater to it here on FB. A couple days later I got a message from the theater thanking me for talking about the theater and the movie, and as an expression of that thanks they gave me two Golden Tickets good for free admission the next time I paid a visit. Well, it’s taken me six months to get back there, but I finally did today and, by cracky, those Golden Tickets were waiting for me just like the theater had promised. So, I used one (1) to treat myself this afternoon to the latest from writer-director Sean Baker (Tangerine, The Florida Project), the Palme D’Or-winning Anora, with the second ticket still waiting in the wings for when the time is next right.

Depending on the degree of male and/or female gaze operating behind the viewer’s eyes, Anora has what has to be described as a captivating opening title sequence, introducing the title character (as played by Mikey Madison, strikingly alert and engaging) and her colleagues in their strip club’s neon-soaked environs. The sequence might just be a jolt to some viewers not necessarily because of the (nonjudgmental) depiction of those sex workers hard at their labors, but because three minutes into the movie those viewers may also notice they are watching that rarity in American film, a movie which features what was once if not a staple on the movie landscape, then at least something about which not to be afraid— actual nudity and sex, delivered with a soupçon of joy, freshness, frankness and abandon, and without a moralizing lesson attached This is writer-director Sean Baker’s M.O., even, as it turns out, when the idyll goes bad.

Anora, or Ani as she prefers, knows a bit of Russian and is directed toward Vanya, a young, callow high roller who has landed in the club with wads of cash to burn and a desire to meet someone who speaks his native language. The two unexpectedly connect on an emotional level to compliment their rowdy yet somehow tender physical one, and soon, during a whirlwind trip to Vegas with a group of friends (all of whom are happy to cut loose and party on Vanya’s seemingly endless dimes), Vanya proposes marriage and he and Ani soon find themselves proclaimed man and wife at the front of one of the city’s express wedding chapels, where Ani giddily pronounces that their union will last forever.

But in a fairy tale like this one (the Cinderella motif is openly acknowledged early on), wedded bliss is, as it turns out, short-lived. Vanya’s parents, well-heeled and extremely impatient Russian capitalists who want him to return home to start work in the family company, are not happy to get the news and soon send a couple of their goons to get the marriage annulled and make sure Ani, who Mom and Dad assume is an opportunistic hooker set on taking advantage of their irresponsible son and laying claim to half the family business fortune, is unceremoniously sent on her way.

At this point I found myself marveling that I was at all engaged in the adventures of such a group of hedonistic, wealth-obsessed young punks, folks whose company I would not likely seek out in real life nor who would likely welcome me into their company. And that unlikely empathy, combined with the aforementioned nonjudgmental attitude, turns out to be Baker’s secret weapon. Suspicion about Vanya is warranted right away, but Baker keeps it at bay through his lively actors, whose motivations seem to be all right there on the surface. If we don’t quite believe this kid’s engagement in their relationship—the Vegas getaway is set up by his blithely paying Ani $15,000 to be “exclusive” to him for the week—there’s little doubt, the way Madison dives into the character, that as seduced by Vanya’s opulent surroundings and obvious access of lots of money as she may be, she’s also in it because she’s starting to love this guy, and believe he loves her too, and she hardly allows herself a moment’s doubt about it.

Which is why, when the goons arrive (Armenians, as Vanya sarcastically observes) and Vanya, rather than defend his love or her honor, saves his own ass (for the moment) and leaves her behind with them, the movie’s emotional charge deepens as Ani continues to defend not only the legality of their marriage to these cretins who would see it annulled, but also the veracity of their mutual love. Ani may undeniably be in it for Vanya’s money, but she’s also there for his heart, a commitment the movie wisely refrains from expounding upon as her passport to a life where she imagines she might be appreciated for herself, not just for what she does. That emotional depth is there even though Baker lets this midsection of the movie sag when it should snap; in the long sequence during which Ani is subdued and made to accompany these goons on an increasingly desperate search for the runaway Vanya—they need to find him before Mom and Dad arrive on the private jet from the old country and demand satisfaction—Baker trades in his Demme-esque empathies for a queasy relentlessness that more resembles Safdie Brothers lite, albeit thankfully minus the apocalyptic dread of something like Uncut Gems. But later, during this long, cold night of seemingly pointless pursuit, one of the goons offers a freezing Ani the comfort of a scarf earlier used to bind and gag her, she accepts, we remember his earlier silent, seemingly sympathetic regard for her, and Baker, like letting loose a breath he’d been holding for too long, effortlessly ushers in an overwhelming and quite unexpected third act which mainlines the Demme influence that had really only been hinted at before.

Buoyed by a star-making performance from Madison (it’s her and Lea Seydoux in The Beast at the top of my list of female performances of 2024) and the residual buzz from the movie’s tender, startling ending, Anora lives up to the description one friend of mine made of it as “the screwball comedy of the year.” Baker’s movie, his best as far as I have seen, offers the pleasures of refashioning that beloved genre more in the mold of Something Wild rather than the endless rom-coms which have more obviously been designed  to co-opt it over the past 30 or 40 years, and it sent me out of the theater on a melancholy high the likes of which I haven’t experienced since seeing Paolo Sorrentino’s Youth in 2015. Every song I listened to on the way home, from Emmylou Harris to Thin Lizzy to Wayne Shorter, seemed to be accessing elements of Baker’s big-hearted beauty (Ani and the movie) in ways that almost seemed supernatural, as if the movie had opened up the world in a way I couldn’t have been anticipated, and it made me want to know more about the characters with whom we find ourselves at that final cut to black. Yet there’s no way I’d trade the feeling the movie left me with, and how that emotion has managed to linger, for the cheap satisfaction of an unnecessary sequel which probably wouldn’t stand comparison with the original anyway. Sublimely earned, the tears Baker leaves us with as the lights fade on Anora are better savored as memories.