LOVE IS A HUSTLE.
The day after watching this film as part of the opening of this year’s Stockholm Film Festival, I was telling a co-worker about it, describing the plot. She asked, ”So this is like Pretty Woman?” Well, the comparison has been made before, but the Julia Roberts classic never entered my mind while watching Anora. Pretty Woman is more like a fairy tale that makes us believe that prostitution might be worth it, because you set the rules, you’re never in danger, and one day Richard Gere will show up. That’s not Anora. While it remains very entertaining and funny throughout, it also feels heartfelt and realistic. At least, up to a point.
A Russian-speaking stripper
23-year-old Ani Mikheeva (Mikey Madison) is a Brooklyn girl who works as an ”exotic dancer” at a Manhattan club. The job pays well, especially when she meets Vanya Zakharov (Mark Eydelshteyn), the 21-year-old son of a Russian oligarch who comes to the club and asks if there’s a stripper who can speak Russian. Ani and Vanya begin to spend time together and she soon sleeps with him for a fee. Ani realizes that Vanya is very immature… but they’re having fun and it’s obvious that his family is very loaded.
He becomes smitten with Ani and pays her to be with him for a full week. It ends with them going to Vegas where they get hitched. They’re both quite honest about it: she gets a bright future as a wealthy wife, he gets a green card so he can avoid working for his dad in Russia. It all changes abruptly when his family learns about the marriage.
Propaganda for Putin?
There have been quiet murmurs about Anora ever since its acclaimed debut in Cannes. Critics were very impressed… but there’s an issue. The film is set among the Russian community in Brooklyn and several actors are in fact Russians. Some of them are in films that are widely seen as propaganda for Putin’s regime; for instance, Yura Borisov, who plays a henchman working for the Zakharov family, starred in AK-47, a Russian movie about Kalashnikov, the inventor of the titular weapon. Among the filmmaking community in countries like Ukraine and the Baltic states, nations that are directly threatened by Putin’s ambitions, there is growing anger about Anora being used as a tool to bring attention to Russian artists serving in a dictator’s propaganda machine. I respect that opinion from people living in Putin’s shadow… but it’s also true that this film paints a very negative portrait of the Russian oligarchy.
Sean Baker cleverly builds tension into his story by implying that something bad might happen.
At first, when it’s clear that the Zakharovs are going to send their henchmen after Vanya and his ”whore” I braced myself for violence… but this is not that film. Indeed, Sean Baker cleverly builds tension into his story by implying that something bad might happen, but he also makes clear that these henchmen are not terribly bright or efficient; as their leader Toros, Karren Karagulian conveys a sense of desperation and frustration that’s pretty hilarious, as he tries to clean up Vanya’s mess.
We’re in for quite a ride, well-paced and funny, as we tag along on the hunt for Vanya who’s run away in Brooklyn, followed by Toros, his crew and Ani who have different reasons to collaborate.
The film is boisterous and unpredictable, like a good night out on town, propelled by excellent performances by Madison as the fiercely combative Ani; Eydelshteyn as the hopelessly childish and selfish Vanya; and Borisov as the goon who’s actually quite timid and falls head over heels for Ani. In spite of all the laughs, there is a real emotional core at the center of the film, as we see in that memorable last scene where Ani finally drops her shield.
Anora 2024-U.S. 139 min. Color. Widescreen. Written, directed and edited by Sean Baker. Cast: Mikey Madison (Anora ”Ani” Mikheeva), Mark Eydelshteyn (Ivan ”Vanya” Zakharov), Yura Borisov (Igor), Karren Karagulian, Vache Tovmasyan, Aleksei Serebryakov.
Trivia: Co-produced by Baker.
Cannes: Palme d’Or.
Last word: “I’m not the first to have an empathetic approach to sex work — definitely, not the first — but I don’t see a lot of it, and it’s few and far between. Often, when I see sex workers depicted, they’re usually supporting characters or the caricatures, and it has become more and more conscious. It has become a conscious decision of mine with each film, more so really to tell a universal story with a fully fleshed out, three-dimensional character, who is a sex worker, in order to just sort of… I wouldn’t say normalize, but there it is, I guess.” (Baker, The Verge)
