Superb mix of tragedy, farce and social commentary laugh-out-loud-funny then suddenly deeply moving

Director: Sean Baker

Cast: Mikey Madison (Anora “Ani” Mikheeva), Mark Eydelshteyn (Ivan “Vanya” Zakharov), Yura Borisov (Igor), Karren Karagulian (Toros), Vache Tovmasyan (Garnick), Aleksei Serebryakov (Nikolai Zakharov), Darya Ekamasova (Galina Zakharova), Lindsey Normington (Diamond), Ivy Wolk (Crystal)

Who doesn’t love a Cinderella story? A plucky young woman comes from nothing to find a life of love and riches she never dreamed of is at the heart of dozens of fairy tales. And films for that matter: it’s impossible to not think about Pretty Woman when watching Anora. In fact, you could argue the at-times surprisingly charming, laugh-out-loud funny but cold-eyed realism of Anora is a Pretty Woman corrective, as if Richard Gere woke up a few days later, introduced Julia Roberts to his friends and family and immediately wondered what the hell he had done.

Not just that but Mikey Madison’s beautifully performed force-of-life Ani (real name Anora, but she doesn’t like it) feels far more like a high-end-stripper-and-occasional-sex-worker than Julia Roberts. She’s 24-years-old, living in Brighton Beach and working in a glossy Manhattan strip club. One night the manager asks her to entertain Ivan (Mark Eydelshteyn), the dissolute, immature son of an extraordinarily wealthy Russian oligarch, because she can speak Russian. Ivan is taken with Ani, paying her $15,000 for a week as his girlfriend that peaks (after a hedonistic stay in Las Vegas) in a marriage proposal. Eloping, Ani returns home believing her life has changed forever. That illusion is shattered when Ani’s godfather Toros (Karren Karagulian), and heavies Garnik (Vache Tovmasyan) and hired muscle Igor (Yura Borisov) turn up at their home (really, of course, Ivan’s parent’s home) under strict instructions that the marriage must come to end. Over a long 24 hours of exasperation, farce and slow realisations our Cinderella story collapses.

Anora is a brilliant film, superbly directed by Sean Baker. You’d expect a film of cold-eyed social realism – and there are elements of this in Anora – but it’s also a hugely loveable, charming, surprisingly hilarious and deeply felt film, perfectly paced as its story develops across a series of events that beautifully lead into each other. A lot of its success comes from Mikey Madison’s extraordinary performance, one of those star-making force-of-nature roles where you start off liking her and end up loving her. Madison is warm but prickly and spikey, vulnerable but determined, worldly but naïve, someone who fights her corner to the end but can’t see any change at forming her own future. Madison embodies all this perfectly, switching from wide-eyed naïve delight at her luck, to spitting, incandescent fury when defending her rights, to an increasingly desperate disillusionment mingled with self-disgust as her dreams collapse around her.

Similar to his previous films, Baker presents the world of sex work with understanding and compassion. There is nothing leering about the lens of Anora, even as it opens with a pan (sound tracked to a disco remix of Take That’s Greatest Day) along a row of dancer. Baker understands the professional drudgery of exotic dancing, the hard work and effort needed to give each client the best experience. Ani is a master of ‘put the client first’ patter, her sing-song Brooklyn accent filled with awe at their dull lives, helping her clients believe they are special. What’s striking about Anora is this a world Ani needs to be ‘saved’ from as such – she’s comfortable with her profession, is good at it and understands it’s limits – but it one where she has subconsciously learned her value as a person is directly related to her body and what she is willing to do with it, complex feelings that return at the film’s conclusion with shattering impact.

What she doesn’t truly understand perhaps is people in the long-term. So swept up and impressed with Ivan’s ostentatious wealth, she misses all the clues to his true character. Anyone who still moves around his apartment by letting his feet slide across the floor, who doesn’t know where the water in the house is kept, plays video games obsessively and hurls himself into sex with the rabbit-like intensity of a horny teenager is about a million miles away from the app developer she first imagines he is. Ivan – very well played by Mark Eydelshteyn – might be sweet, excitable and full of joie de vivre, but he’s also staggeringly immature, extremely selfish and barely thinks about anyone other than himself. Or maybe Ani does notice, but she’s so used to being part of a perverse service industry, she assumes this is normal. Ivan may profess to love Ani, but he is the grasping, self-obsession of a spoilt teenager who no-one has ever said no to.

Baker’s care and regard for his characters is beautifully done – in fact what’s striking about Anora is how characters who at first feel peripheral and marginal are organically grow, emerging over time as crucial figures. In fact, what’s striking about it is that it becomes very much a film about class: about the have and have-nots and how all of us – from put-upon fixer to stripper – have more in common with each other than with the super-rich, to whom everyone else are nothing but staff, there to meet their needs. There is only a small degree of difference between the cleaner Ivan teases while she cleans his floors and Ani who he teases while she allows him to get his end away in bed.

This become clear when the film enters it’s hilarious second act, as Ivan’s godfather Toros (a side-splitting performance by Karren Karagulian as man on the verge of a nervous breakdown) can barely hide his resentment at being Ivan’s dogsbody – while still terrified at how his super-powerful parents could ruin Toros’ life in seconds (and clearly wouldn’t think twice about it). Such is their power, Toros leaves his own child’s christening to clean up Ivan’s mess – and its clear he’s been doing this his whole life (his first appearance is easy to miss, ordering Ivan’s drunken friends to get off the sofa at the debauched New Year’s party he throws). Equally good is Vache Tovmasyan as the increasingly bemused Garvik, medicine addled and slowly losing his composure over one never-ending night.

What these characters have in common – along with Yuro Borisov’s Igor, hired muscle like Ani valued only for his physicality – is that to their employers they are less people and more items of furniture or household utensils. Ivan is no different from his tyrannical parents, who may deplore their son’s selfish wastefulness but have never done anything to stop it. Anora’s tragedy (among the comedy) is watching (and Mikey Madison does this beautiful in a series of micro reactions) Ani release only the thinnest slither of affection makes her any different from Ivan’s cleaner. To Ivan, she’s a status symbol – an attractive woman, great in bed who his hangers-on can be impressed by, a tool for rebellion, marrying her the ideal fuck an immature teenager can imagine for the parents he fears and resents.

Baker’s film unfolds all this with astonishing skill, but also an overwhelming energy and joy – and I have to stress again, that Anora’s middle section is hilariously funny, much more so than many conventional comedies – but also an empathy that eventually lands with a devastating and surprising force. Mikey Madison’s extraordinary performance deeply invests in Ani, understanding how her spiky exterior hides a vulnerable interior she rarely exposes. Every performance is outstanding – kudos also to Yuri Borisov who so subtly draws Igor’s quiet decency under his thuggish exterior, that his growing prominence in the film feels completely natural.

Anora is a film that deconstructs the reality of Cinderella stories. But it’s also a film that feels very much about the world today, where all of us have our lives directed and influenced by the super-wealthy in ways we have become so used to, we don’t even notice it anymore. It’s more obvious with strippers, cleaners, fixers and hired muscle. But if Ivan’s parents sank a business, how many families would be drowned in the waves? Under the heartfelt characters, the superbly paced drama, the farce and the emotional moments, Anora captures a universal truth about our modern age that all of us, like Ani, have tried to close our eyes against.