This article appeared in the October 18, 2024 edition of The Film Comment Letter, our free weekly newsletter featuring original film criticism and writing. Sign up for the Letter here.

Anora (Sean Baker, 2024)

Sean Baker’s films so far have predominantly explored the lives of sex workers, perhaps because the transactional nature of their interactions with people demonstrates his larger interest in how money defines relationships. These films have been lauded for their humanism, and for their destigmatization of this labor. In Starlet (2012) and Tangerine (2015), for example, he draws indelible characters who sell access to their bodies while seeking meaningful connections elsewhere. His actors’ appeal often mirrors their on-screen occupations as facilitators of fantasy. These tough yet vulnerable individuals have forebears in Mae West and Louise Brooks, actresses whose seductive tools merge with those of the camera but hint at depths below the surface.

Baker’s latest, the Palme d’Or–winning Anora, opens with Mikey Madison, in the title role, writhing in a stranger’s lap in a Manhattan strip club. The club’s ethereal lighting, shimmering on her skin to the accompaniment of Take That’s “Greatest Day” (“Stay close to me, watch the world come alive tonight…”), seems to offer her up as an object of desire onto whom the audience can project their own illusions. This is dispelled when Anora—or, as she prefers, Ani—steps out of the club and takes the early-morning train to her cramped apartment in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, a neighborhood where opulent Russian supper clubs are tucked away in the dowdy cityscape of a working-class outer-borough neighborhood. Ani’s sensual dancing is a workaday grind in a city that toggles between filth and fantasy. Baker has made great use of untrained actors in lead roles; in contrast, Madison—cast after he saw her as a Manson girl in Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood (2019)—comes on strong as a cinematic concoction of elements drawn from other movies, her heavy Brooklyn accent possibly sourced from Goodfellas (1990), or maybe My Cousin Vinny (1992).

Her routine is upended when she writhes in the lap of Vanya (Mark Eydelshteyn), an ungainly young Russian who seems barely out of his teens. He’s been dumped in Brooklyn by his oligarch parents, who have hired a trio of thuggish babysitters to mind him as he fritters away time in his family’s garish oceanfront mansion. He plays video games, throws parties, and once he hires Ani, humps her with the vigor of a horny terrier. Ani understands Russian, and this, along with their closeness in age, becomes the fickle foundation for a relationship that moves beyond the transactional when Vanya offers to pay Ani to be his girlfriend for a week. An impulsive trip to Las Vegas is the catalyst for an impromptu marriage proposal, consecrated in a glaring all-night chapel. Vegas is perfectly cast here as a glittering fever dream that lures people to their private catastrophes. It’s fitting that in this setting, floating high up in the desert air in a ridiculous hotel suite, Ani becomes vulnerable to her own fantasies. Her fall from this lofty height is preordained.

Her delusion is buttressed by the architecture that surrounds her. Back in New York, Vanya’s mansion is an over-the-top space that complements the gaudiness of the Vegas suite, both on the opposite end of the spectrum from the tacky, castle-themed highway motel in The Florida Project (2017). In settings both grim and glamorous, Baker knows that despair is the bedrock for the false-front distractions of American kitsch.

Soon after their return from Vegas, the moment of Ani’s crisis arrives. Having learned of Vanya’s marriage through a tabloid, his parents are desperate to have it annulled. The thug babysitters come knocking at the mansion, and what follows is a nearly-30-minute explosion of violent, slapstick-infused physical choreography that falls somewhere between the brutal fantasy of action movies and the hijinks of screwball comedies. Vanya’s home, with its many windows facing the Atlantic Ocean, offers ample space, and many breakable valuables, for casual destruction.

It was an unnerving experience to watch this sequence with an audience that howled with laughter as Ani was being overpowered by menacing men. I was disturbed, though I later found myself thinking of Howard Hawks’s His Girl Friday (1940), another film whose emotional weight risks getting lost in a flurry of frantic action. There is a grim tragedy at the core of Hawks’s whimsical romantic farce: a man is due to be executed the next day, and the press and politicians are practically giddy with the prospect. The condemned man’s plight is secondary to the marriage concerns of the well-to-do reporters, who are eager to bank his story and sail off into their own domestic bliss. Hawks makes a discomfiting connection between the audience gathering for the execution and the audience enjoying his movie, prodding his viewers to realize that they are complicit in making an entertaining spectacle out of something so awful (and based on a true story). Watching Anora, I became similarly aware of the disconnect between the audience’s expectations, basking in the glow of cinema spectacle, and what Baker ultimately delivers to them.

While Ani is fighting off Vanya’s minders, the young husband bolts from his mansion and disappears, forcing her to join forces with the goons in pursuit of him. This mismatched crew embarks on a long car ride through the streets of New York City, giving Baker an opportunity to reference other cinematic tours through the gritty, ’70s-era NYC of The French Connection (1971) and The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (1974), with the nod to ’70s cinema further underscored by his choice of 35mm film and use of vintage camera filters. Ani clings to her belief in the sanctity of her marriage, though she looks especially battle-worn as she checks her reflection in the mirror, touching the scratches on her cheek from the earlier scrum. In the back seat, a laconic thug named Igor (Yura Borisov) gazes at her with concern and empathy. She has more in common with these men, Vanya’s employees, whose fate is of no consequence to him.

Ani wields one last blow when she finally confronts Vanya and his ludicrously wealthy parents with a “gotcha.” This potential redemption for her elicited cheers and claps from the audience, only to be deflated instantly when wealth and power have their inevitable victories. All of this is in keeping with Baker’s repeat target: the American Dream’s false claim that anyone can make it here, and that institutions—and industries—protect individuals.

In the film’s final scene—set in flat, gray daylight, with snow falling over Brighton Beach—Ani breaks down. The emotional rawness of the moment punctures the veneer of Madison’s occasionally cartoonish performance, definitively ending any false notions that Anora would follow the conventions of rom-coms à la Pretty Woman (1990). Instead, Anora joins other recent standouts like Bong Joon Ho’s Parasite (2019) and Jordan Peele’s Nope (2022) in deftly using genre structures to lure audiences into deeper, and muddier, waters than they might expect.

Rebecca Cleman is a writer and the director of Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), and most recently the co-editor of The New Television: Video After Television, published by no place press and slated for release in December.