When word broke that Sean Baker's Anora had received top honours at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival, cinema junkies everywhere shared a collective gasp of excitement. An underground phenomenon of sorts, Baker's been quietly proving himself as a singular yet difficult-to-define voice in indie arthouse cinema for over a decade now.
His life-changing 2015 breakthrough Tangerine shook the souls of the lucky few who watched it, as did its prestige and Oscar-nominated follow-up, The Florida Project. While his previous effort, Red Rocket, took a step backwards towards obscurity, fans have been scanning the horizon, wondering what the shoegaze auteur would do next. And sure enough, Baker has conjured his masterpiece with Anora, a love story unlike anything we've ever seen.
The opening image dollies along a scene of mostly nude erotic dancers giving solo performances for a collection of heartbreakingly ordinary men. Then, the camera finds Anora, played by Mikey Madison, who radiates an impossible magnetism. The film's title is outrageously appropriate, as every moment of this hysterical experiment in chaotic fantasy fulfilment is centred squarely on its truly lovable protagonist.
Anora, or Ani as she prefers to be called, is the only stripper at her club who happens to speak Russian, so she's therefore assigned to a goofy 21-year-old rich kid, Ivan (Mark Eydelshteyn), whose English is as halting as Ani's Russian. While their relationship starts superficially, there's still an undeniable and immediate chemistry between the two of them from the jump.
The financially struggling Anora soon finds herself swept up into the world of her unimaginably wealthy suitor, and it's like witnessing a glittering alternate universe where 50 Shades of Grey was a pristine example of perfect filmmaking and storytelling. That's Anora — a modern Cinderella story, steeped in sex, drugs and messy characters who mean no harm, but don't mean well either. It's a tale ingrained in grey areas, impeccably committed to neither good nor bad, kind nor evil. And it's all set in the extraordinary lap of one of the world's wealthiest, most morally ambiguous inhabitants.
As an exotic dancer, we're unsure if Ani has engaged in sex work before meeting Ivan, but she's quick to let him overpay for sex and sweep her into a full-time girlfriend position. Desperate to defy his parents' prying expectations, he proposes to Anora, and, for a brief moment, they live life to its absolute fullest. But, when Ivan's parents send out their henchmen to force their child into an annulment, true colours on all sides begin to emerge, and the real madness of Baker's story unfolds.
While Madison's portrayal of Ani will surely go down in history, Eydelshteyn also gives a generation-defining performance as Ivan, a reckless free spirit who leaves the earth unintentionally scorched behind him wherever he goes. His performance matches Madison's shimmering, bad-girl magnum opus, and while I may regret phrasing it this way, these two match each other's freak in a way that leaves viewers in love with them both — for a moment, at least. Ivan's goofy charm is disarmingly hilarious, leaving the audience as unsure what to make of him as Anora is. But we fall for him just the same. Thankfully, we're just a little more jaded to fuckboys than Ani is — I mean, she's only 23, after all.
And while Eydelshteyn is the secret weapon of Baker's brilliant comedy, it's Madison who goes fully nuclear, permanently embedding herself into the topsoil of popular culture with this role. She continues to dig deeper beneath the surface as the film progresses, taking command of the narrative as she faces down Armenian hired muscle without breaking a sweat.
Madison's portrayal of Ani greatly benefited from the sex work consulting of Toronto-based author and performer Andrea Werhun. There's something purposefully not fully realistic about Ani, and, being familiar with the blinding realism of Baker's Tangerine, it's clear his heroine has been sprinkled with a conscious dash of bewitching post-manic pixie dream girl fantasy.
What I loved most about Anora was its undying and relentlessly surprising commitment to kindness. There are ample opportunities to break bones, spill blood, kill, die, maim or disappear — but it never happens. Instead, the comedy skyrockets into absurd, wholesome chaos, transforming the romantic fantasy into a brilliant comedy of errors as it sprints through Baker's beautifully framed streets of New York City. The hired guns mean well, yet still find themselves in more danger than our heroes ever do. Ultimately, everyone has good intentions, and every single speaking role in this masterpiece will make audiences fall in love with them, no matter how scared we should be instead.
Sean Baker has accomplished the impossible with Anora, a film that defies categorization — it's a playground of sex, drugs, fantasy fulfilment and has its artfully unapologetic male gaze fixed squarely on the ethereal miracle that is Mikey Madison.