Directed by: Sean Baker
Starring: Mikey Madison, Yura Borisov,
Paul Weissman, Mark Eydelshteyn
Drama/Comedy/Romance | R | 2 hr 19 min
5 stars
By Reed Ripley
Critics often throw around the term “real” to describe what they believe to be an excellent dramatic film (present company included), but what does that mean? It’s not necessarily a lazy term—a film coming off as “real” is one of the greatest compliments out there, and it’s often based on a subjective, personal connection that’s tough to translate. Anora is as “real” as real gets, and it’s hard to imagine walking away from it without deeply feeling something.
Anora, the story of Ani, a young Brooklyn sex worker (Mikey Madison) who elopes with Ivan, the spoiled, immature son of a Russian oligarch (Mark Eydelshteyn), has a level of emotional depth and character development that’s extremely difficult for a film to pull off. There are only a couple hours with which to work, and trying to give the audience both a cast of characters to care about (where it’s not simply a singular character study) and developing true emotional resonance often stretches a film too thinly.
Not so with Anora, thanks to incredible writing and direction from Sean Baker and stellar performances from the cast across the board. Baker’s transcriptions of the human experience to the screen are so unique—people feel a lot of things simultaneously, and it’s never as simple as “I feel sad” or “I feel happy.” Anora’s focus on that experience is hardly rare for a drama (that’s kind of the genre’s whole point), but Baker’s methodology feels singular thanks largely to Baker’s clear understanding of, and eventual subverting of, audience expectations.
Anora is structured as a fairy tale, with Ani as Cinderella, fatefully whisked away from the lowest level of society by a prince who sees her for the beautiful princess she is inside. Anora is also in direct conversation with Pretty Woman, another sex worker-as-Cinderella fairy tale with which audiences are almost certainly familiar, and the film uses those reference points to set up expectations for a happy ending. But Anora isn’t concerned with a “happy” ending—it’s much more interested in what that even means and how longing for a happy ending can twist someone into emotional knots.
That’s not to say Anora is bleak and absent of hope—at times, it’s quite the opposite, and that’s the point. Ani’s not necessarily in a bad place at the film’s start, but she’s not in a great place, either, and when presented with an apparent opportunity to get what she feels she deserves, she takes it, and along with it, the consequences. All that’s shown through a lightning bolt of a performance from Madison, whose physicality and emotional range are truly thrilling.
Like many of Baker’s films, Anora uses those on society’s periphery to tell its story, which emphasizes the universality of its commentary. Everyone’s dealing with these emotions, even those generally out of sight and out of mind, including (and probably especially) those who appear emotionally one-note or out of touch. That’s beautiful—and yes, real—and it’s worth exploring.
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