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.

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