The first rule of dating a Russian oligarch is: Don’t ever ask where their money comes from. The title character of Anora breaks this rule in the first 10 minutes of the movie, but I can’t give her too hard a time since she’s only 23. Wouldn’t you know it, though? She goes and breaks the second rule of dating a Russian oligarch: Don’t marry one. There the trouble begins in this wild sex comedy, which won the Golden Palm at the Cannes Film Festival this past summer, and which opens at the AMC Clearfork this week. I don’t think it’s one of the year’s best movies, but is it ever a blast.
Mikey Madison portrays Anora Mikhailova, who is “Ani” to everyone she knows and works as a stripper at a high-end club in Manhattan. While she speaks English with a deep-dish Noo Yawk accent, she understands Russian, which buys her an introduction to 21-year-old Ivan Zakharov (Mark Eydelshteyn), a client at the club who’s throwing around oodles of cash. He invites her to his New Year’s party and becomes so infatuated with her that he offers her $10,000 to be his girlfriend for a week — he uses the word “devushka,” and she raises the price to $15,000. On a whim and a lot of drugs, he takes her and six of his closest friends to Las Vegas. When the seven days are up there, he proposes marriage to Ani so that he won’t have to go back to the motherland.
Many people, including myself, have noted writer-director Sean Baker’s refreshing non-judgmental view of sex work in his films, which happen in places as different as the Southern California porn industry (Starlet) and a small town in South Texas (Red Rocket). What’s easy to overlook is his old-school filmmaking chops. The highlight of this film is a superb, extended comic scene when Ivan’s parents hear about his marriage and send three thugs (Karren Karagulian, Vache Tovmasyan, and Yura Borisov) — two Armenians and a Russian — to his mansion to force him to dissolve the marriage. Ani does not take this lying down, and really doesn’t like it when they refer to her with the word “prostitutka.” It’s terribly funny to see these professional gangsters reduced to helplessness by a tiny woman in her underwear throwing glass ornaments at them.
Ivan himself runs off during the fracas, and the mobsters have to take more crap from mouthy New Yorkers as they go through the city looking for him. A frozen-yogurt shop manager cops an attitude with them and threatens them with a baseball bat, and while that’s happening, their car gets towed, and the tow truck driver (Sebastian Conelli) curses a blue streak at them for leaving their vehicle in the middle of the street. Still without their babysitting charge, they sit in a diner and stuff their faces with hamburgers while fretting, “We are so fucked!” Their job seems more degrading than Anora’s does.
That said, I don’t really buy the idea that Ani has actually fallen in love with Ivan, who spends a lot of time playing video games and seems to lose interest in her once he orgasms. She may be young, but she’s not a newbie — when her strip club boss (Vincent Radwinsky) objects to her taking a week off, she tells him, “Give me health benefits and a 401(k), and then we’ll talk about when I do and don’t work.” (There are too few people looking out for the labor rights of sex workers, and it’s worth pointing out that strippers don’t get the same benefits as employees.) The lead actors have some chemistry, but not enough to make it convincing that she thinks that this man-child might actually stand up to his parents who are paying for all his partying. I’m not sure this is that much deeper than Pretty Woman, the movie that most critics are comparing Anora favorably to.
At least Madison makes almost as big an impression as Julia Roberts did in that movie. The newcomer portrayed the killer in the Scream reboot and one of Charles Manson’s followers in Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood. She makes a blazing impression whether she’s trading professional banter with the men in the strip club or trying to get Ivan to act like a proper husband to her. Borisov contributes a well-turned performance as the thug who subdues Anora by tying her up with phone cord but also is the only man here who tries to be a decent human being to her. Even so, while all of Baker’s films have featured terrific lead performances, this is the first one that feels like the minting of a new star. That’s worth the price of a ticket, and maybe even the cost of a private room at a strip club.
Anora
Starring Mikey Madison and Mark Eydelshteyn. Written and directed by Sean Baker. Rated R.
