Anora, Sean Baker’s latest Academy Award-winning film, feels like a great film in its totality because it sort of uses its full length to show us the real state of mind of its title character. The film that has a stripper as the main character has this template rom-com structure in the beginning, and it then transitions into a humorous manhunt and eventually a character study. What really makes this indie drama exciting are these contrasting transitions, and through that, writer-director Sean Baker manages to add so many layers to the story.
Anora, aka Ani, is a stripper in New York. One day, she got this customer, who is a 21-year-old Russian guy, Ivan, aka Vanya, who was looking for an escort who could speak English. The intimate connection the two felt made Vanya ask her to be his girlfriend during his stay in the US. We see how this relationship evolves over the course of that one week and what happens after that in Anora.
If you look at the posters of this movie, it gives you a feeling that you are going to watch this escapist romantic film where a rich guy finds true love and connection with a hooker. The first 40-odd minutes of this movie have that texture with all these visuals of partying and sex on screen. It is actually in the second act of the movie we get to see a better look at each of the characters. Unlike other films that would use the antagonist-oligarch trope for violence and brutality, Sean Baker goes after a tense situation that paves the way for some hilarious moments.
From being a glossy romantic film, Anora transitions to being this comedic manhunt. But where the film really scores is in the final act, where the real politics of class divide comes into the picture. The good thing is we are not shown this through dialogue lectures. We are not given too much information about Anora’s past, and we can clearly see that, except for one person in her dance bar, she doesn’t really have any friends. Even in romantic bits of the movie, Sean Baker gives us a hint that Ani might be doing all this to escape from her current life. In the film’s second act, where she is pretty mad at everyone, you would feel like judging her as an opportunist. But Sean uses that bit effectively to build a second story.
One of the things that stayed with me in the writing of the film is how it places the idea of judgment in various places. Ivan’s friends, local guardian, and even his Russian parents are looking at Ani as a mere hooker who sort of manipulated the man-child to get his money. In multiple instances in the film, we are shown that Ani is not happy with the way she is addressed as a prostitute or hooker in this relationship. Ironically, Ani, who hates judgment, is judging this Russian henchman Igor for his looks, name, and origin. We can sort of sense something happening between the two, and it was interesting how Sean Baker used this judging attitude of Ani as her guard at a point typically any movie would use as an ice-break moment.
Baker, who won the best editor at the Academy Awards, paces the movie in an engrossing manner. Some adjacent scenes have this stark contrast from one another thanks to the 180-degree difference in sound design, and that subconsciously gives us an idea about the loneliness the title character is experiencing. Drew Daniels has used the neon lights in the initial bits somewhat extensively to give it that glowing cinematic look, and in the rest of the movie, the visual texture is drastically different as we have less agile chaotic scenes and static and relatively closer character shots.
Mikey Madison delivers a solid performance as Anora in this film. It is the evolution of the character that happens in the second and third acts of the movie that feels more challenging as there is rage and helplessness blended into that character. Yura Borisov as Igor underplays the empathetic character pretty effectively on screen. Karren Karagulian as the panicking Toros and Vache Tovmasyan as the clueless goon were hilarious in performing their parts. Mark Eydelshteyn, as the mostly sloshed-out Ivan, was pretty convincing as the impulsive man-child.
Anora is like a blend of two love stories that have certain generic beats. However, Sean Baker is staging this movie as a character study by giving us two dimensions of the same character, one from her point of view and one from the point of view of a third person. While the busyness of the screenplay does not really give you enough time to empathize with the drastic and desperate efforts of Anora, I thought the very final moment in the movie where she breaks down puts you in a space where you would think what she may have gone through in the earlier part of her life.
What really makes this indie drama exciting are the contrasting transitions, and through that, writer-director Sean Baker manages to add so many layers to the story.
Green: Recommended Content
Orange: The In-Between Ones
Red: Not Recommended
