Ano­ra review – an amaz­ing, hyper­mod­ern con­cept for a film

One of life’s small plea­sures involves fol­low­ing writer/​direc­tor Sean Bak­er on the social media plat­form Let­ter­boxd and track­ing his high­ly eso­teric view­ing habits. Indeed, in the end cred­its to his lat­est, Palme d’Or-winning fea­ture, Ano­ra, he extends spe­cial thanks to the dis­rep­utable Span­ish genre hack, Jesús Fran­co, whose films are reli­ably awash with female nudi­ty and human entrails. This inter­est in what you might term the eco­nom­ic fringes of cin­e­ma – ie, the direc­tors who were real­ly mak­ing sure that every diñero count­ed – extends to Baker’s inter­est in those mem­bers of the labour mar­ket whose occu­pa­tions might be seen by some as dis­rep­utable (porn-stars in Star­let and Red Rock­et, sex work­ers in Tan­ger­ine) but are also doing what they need to do to keep to get the job done, and make it count.

In Ano­ra, the cen­tral pro­tag­o­nist (Mikey Madison’s Ani) is a strip­per by trade, yet she is some­one whose strength of char­ac­ter allows her to retain a vice-like con­trol over her throngs of clients. That is until the gawky Russ­ian expat bro, Ivan (Mark Eidel­stein), drops by for a dance and, with Ani aware of his super-rich oli­garch con­nec­tions back home, deets are duly swapped and soon the pair are hook­ing up out­side the club for oth­er (paid-for) liaisons. Ivan’s obscene wealth means that deci­sion-mak­ing for him comes with­in a vac­u­um of respon­si­bil­i­ty; he’s able to live a life of instinc­tu­al one-touch plea­sure seeking.

Ani, mean­while, is forced to play the angles, quick­ly weigh­ing-up the pros and cons of every micro social inter­ac­tion, know­ing that if she’s able to put in a good enough per­for­mance, she’ll like­ly roll out with a healthy cut of the loot. A whirl­wind trip to Las Vegas ends in the way that most such trips do, and Ani is then count­ing down the days before she gets to meet her new in-laws. Yet Ivan the Ter­ri­ble has been a very naughty boy, and his par­ents go to extreme lengths to annul the union.

It’s an amaz­ing, hyper­mod­ern con­cept for a film, one which oper­ates as a bru­tal cri­tique of the class sys­tem, while also act­ing as a metaphor for geopo­lit­i­cal rela­tion­ships and the moral and eth­i­cal laps­es we some­times over­look in the name of mak­ing rent. Yet it also says that accu­mu­la­tion of wealth is anath­e­ma to the accu­mu­la­tion of char­ac­ter, of wit, of self-preser­va­tion, and so as much as upper class peo­ple want to keep low­er class peo­ple out, they also want to keep their own peo­ple in and safe.

Bak­er shoots and chore­o­graphs like a punk Cas­savetes, toy­ing with dynam­ics, colours and tex­tures while always cre­at­ing chunky knots of over­lap­ping dia­logue in a bid to height­en ten­sions to break­ing point and beyond. The film los­es its way a lit­tle dur­ing its lat­ter half, when we’re treat­ed to a lengthy tour of New York’s Russ­ian-Amer­i­can cul­tur­al haunts, all over­laid with much high-pitched shriek­ing. Yet unlike a Jesús Fran­co movie, where every­one dies hor­ri­bly in the end, here, Ani is even­tu­al­ly imbued with a new, revi­tal­is­ing force with­out hav­ing to fun­da­men­tal­ly change who she is.

Lit­tle White Lies is com­mit­ted to cham­pi­oning great movies and the tal­ent­ed peo­ple who make them.

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