Anora (2024)

Hot erotic dancer meets Russian oligarch's goofball son. Discuss.

The blissful just-married couple in Las Vegas; their twisted fate doesn’t stay there

Anora (2024)

In theaters

This is a whirling dervish of a movie (winner of the 2024 Palme D’or at Cannes) that demands you hang on for a sexed-up ride.  We’re plunged into a darkened, hotly lit orgiastic nightspot in Manhattan where in intermingled shadow and darkness male patrons pay to let near-naked sex-workers take charge.

And do they ever.  These “erotic dancers” know just which buttons to push to induce their panting male clients to slip cash into the straps of their gyrating G-strings.

Writer-director Sean Baker (The Florida Project) focuses on Ani (Mikey Madison), a 21-year-old who dominates her patrons with a girlish “innocence” that’s clearly an act, her professional “gimmick”. 

Her Russian name is Anora, but she’s ditched it as too fancy for cash-on-the-line nightclub bargaining.

Like the other “girls” (as they call each other), she strips down to little more than a thong, her breasts fully exposed, and whether or not actual penetration is taking place, the performers’ strategic positioning and the camera’s discreet angles let us imagine carnal bliss.

But for sure there’s no actual closeness – you know, affection, trust or any of that stuff – going on.  There’s glee, a charnel house brazenness, in the businesslike impersonality of it all.  This is transactional sex, so why not relax and see where it goes?

For Ani the action gets a higher rise when she’s introduced to Ivan (Mark Eydelshteyn), a gangly, wide-eyed Russian layabout who’s also 21.

He barely speaks English, and she speaks only basic Russian (picked up from her Russian grandmother), yet with limited shared vocabulary and unbridled lust, they “make it” in the club and he – she’s now fondly calling him “Vanya” – invites her to his baronial mansion.

It’s a luxurious, gated estate.  Seeing it, she’s impressed with the opulence.  Within minutes the couple guzzle booze, tumble into in bed and go at it.  To him she’s a dream sex toy while she’s so proficient at sex that she blithely satisfies him and has time to look around and wonder how he lives on such a grand, opulent scale.

No trick at all.  He’s the son of wealthy Russians and can spend lavishly on his clothes, champagne, visits to sex clubs and, vitally, travel.

After he invites her to live with him for a week, where debauchery is their chief preoccupation, he’s so entranced with their sex he implores her to fly to Las Vegas in one of his parents’ private jets and marry him.

Done.  Once they return to New York and settle into “married life” – more drinking, drugs, computer games and of course more sex – reality doesn’t just knock, it storms in.

Toros (Karren Karagulian), is the Russian family’s bullheaded chief operative in America, an Armenian who genuflects to his Russian employers and has promised them he’ll keep careful watch over erratic Ivan.

This enforcer is appalled at the young man’s liaison with what he calls a “prostitute” – a description Ani furiously denies – and is apoplectic to find out they’re married.  Terrified, he knows his job is on the line for letting his charge go so wildly astray.

Accompanied by Igor (Yura Borisov), a seemingly slow-witted strongman, and Garnick (Vache Tovmasyan), a sycophantic underling, Toros in denouncing and physically wrangling with Ani allows Ivan to slip away into the New York sexual underworld.

Finding the runaway consumes much of the movie’s second half. And bringing him completely to heel doesn’t happen before his furious parents arrive from Russia on yet another private jet.

Much of this is performed with screwball comedy frenzy, and Baker’s disciplined direction renders his actors’ flailing, fisticuffs and fury with tight precision.

The brute physicality includes broken noses, smashed furniture and violent physical restraint – at one point Ani is tightly held in Igor’s grip and gagged to halt her raging resistance.  Toros informs her she’ll be paid off; the marriage will be annulled; and she must never see Ivan again.

Baker is trying to honor Ani’s fierce need for self-respect, and the feckless Ivan can provide no help, since he’s not remotely self-aware.  Unsurprisingly, she discovers that genuine self-regard, like most virtues, begins at home, in her case, in her own mind.

That’s the central revelation the plot keeps careening toward as the motley foursome searches after-dark New York looking for Ivan.  It dawns on us that Ani doesn’t need him as much as she needs vindication for the hopes she nourished by hastily marrying this manchild.  He’s far less capable of introspection than she is.

And Baker gives this grossly ill-matched couple, and the mayhem they bring on, an impressive cut and thrust rhythm which falters only a bit in the story’s final stretch, when Ani’s dreams begin to slip from her grasp.

But why are we on this wild ride?  Her dreams were never remotely realistic from the start, yet we’re asked to care about Ani and revile the imbecilic Ivan and his cruel parents determined to bust up their son’s disastrous marriage to a woman they don’t hesitate to demean as a “whore”.

I admired the way Ani hotly refuses to let that word stand, especially since by then she’s in too deep to put up much of a fight.

The free-spirited Ani wants out of erotic clubland, even as she shines brightly there

If only I felt more for her.  Baker has placed her in a quandary most New York teenagers would see coming.  She doesn’t seem even basically street-smart by overlooking Ivan’s glaring immaturity.  Why and how deeply she’s smitten by an aimless rich brat – Toros’ exact words to describe him – I never got a grip on.  

Mikey Madison gives a go-for-broke performance and with her dark moist eyes and physical bravura she brings a starry presence to a raucous movie that needs a center to keep us focused.  Madison’s winsome yet feral energy steers us through the story’s wild mood swings.

But for all Madison’s evident talent, Ani isn’t tested rigorously enough by Baker’s almost brotherly stand alongside her in his script.

Ivan’s idiocy and his parents’ cruelty don’t illuminate Ani’s inner struggle.  I hated seeing her smacked around and insulted.  But I was still puzzled that she got herself into this mess with a young man going nowhere.

And sympathetic as Baker is to Ani, I couldn’t go along.  An experienced sex worker in New York City would have quickly seen through con artists and fakes far slicker than a grinning simpleton like Ivan.

His glamorous digs and wild spending should have warned Ani, after smartly collecting the money he paid her for the week’s stay, to pass by this recklessly callow youth.

Baker deserves praise for giving sex workers a depth and humanity that movies rarely do.  The explicit sex scenes are played with terrific comic abandon yet never feel pornographic.

And the blizzard of profanity is, for once in a movie, wholly appropriate when tossed about among a dumb kid, a thick-skinned sex worker and paid muscle clinging to their jobs doing dirty work for a wealthy family.  If the unhinged sexual glee and eventual fury didn’t grow foul-mouthed, we wouldn’t believe it.

The acting has a looseness and eruptive anger that feel free, bouncing, justifiably snappish.  Troubled people sinking into deeper trouble.  There’s no honor among these desperate characters, and their sad realization that none of them have clean hands is one of the script’s strengths.

Amid the often-sordid mayhem, Baker has written in one watchful, morally alert character who only slowly reveals good intentions.  It won’t do to point out who finds a sliver of gallantry.

But Baker inserts such a grace note here just as he did in The Florida Project, where Willem Dafoe’s watchful eye on children at risk turned him into a vital angel of mercy.

Baker wants to hold out that kind of hope for his characters even at their coarsest and most bewildered.  But for all his blunt candor, his soft spot for Ani conceals what we most want to know about her:  the explicit cause of the pain from her past that she uses sex to deaden.

The writer-director’s disporting her in graphic thrall and egging her on to spit rage doesn’t get us nearer to answering that question.  We see a lot of Ani thrashing about, but we never find out where her long-buried tears are coming from.  The movie gives off two hours and 19 minutes of heat, but by the end we’ve gotten too little light.