A comedy of greed storms the world.
Sean Baker’s Cannes Film Festival Palm d’Or winner Anora rings Millennial changes on the old “hooker with a heart of gold” routine. Baker introduces his heroine Anora (Mikey Madison), who goes by the nickname Ani, hard at work giving a lap dance in a lineup at a Brooklyn strip club. This multihued opening combines gonzo documentary realism with soft-porn audacity.
Baker specializes in what used to be called the demimonde but now exists as the lawless, shadow America where a subculture of criminals, drug dealers, sex workers, and other social parasites parody the old-fashioned ethics of the straight world. And like wriggly, foul-mouthed Ani, they do it with brazen entitlement (as seen in Baker’s Tangerine, The Florida Project, and Red Rocket).
In Anora, Baker cranks this social disorder up to ten. He is what’s popularly called an “unreliable narrator,” totally in sync with Ani’s moral confusion, drawing out of Madison a performance of unabashed profanity that’s sheer exhibitionism. When Ani gets her French-tipped claws into Russian immigrant client Ivan Zakharov (Mark Eidelshtein), the youthful, sexual athleticism of their match-up (lots of romping between X-Box and dope-smoking) surpasses Larry Clark’s voyeurism in Kids, Bully, and Another Day in Paradise.
This amorality becomes the basis of Baker’s progressive zeal and social criticism. Ivan, the acned, wayward son of rich Russians, invites Ani, the daughter of Russian-immigrant proles, into his unearned privilege. (“God bless America!” Ivan climaxes after Ani does her tricks.) And Baker, no longer an indie filmmaker shooting with a cellphone, uses widescreen technology where the lens curves to encompass the opulence of a gated palatial mansion, complete with elevator. The pair’s hasty wedding in Las Vegas sets off a farce in which Ivan’s enraged parents attempt to annul the marriage, with the help of frazzled, exasperated members of the Russian community: an Orthodox fixer-priest Toros (Karren Karagulian) and his inept enforcers, Igor (Yura Borisov) and Garnick (Vache Tovmasyan).
Driving a Cadillac Escalade through Coney Island, these “responsible” émigrés search for Ivan, who has absconded (“I’ll become an American, and my parents can suck my dick!”), leaving Ani to defend her latest conquest (“You hit the lotto, bitch!” enthuses an envious stripper). Baker tours the ramshackle, bilingual American dream of ethnic rivalries between Russians and Armenians and belligerent working-class youths addicted to sneakers and video games. Igor and Garnick ultimately succumb to the supposed charms of the annoying Ani, admiring the feistiness of a girl who shrugs off sexual exploitation and the professional abuse of herself and others. (Baker’s close-up of Ani’s mouth screaming “Rape!” at hapless Igor and Garnick brings down the house.)
The absurdity of Anora is first evident in its lack of eroticism. Sex means nothing to Ani — it is separate from her emotions. That’s where Baker differs from Fellini’s Nights of Cabiria, the greatest whore-with-a-heart-of-gold movie; Fellini understood a working girl’s spiritual alienation (as did Bob Fosse in his musical adaptation, Sweet Charity). But Ani sports butterfly nail-art (unlike her co-worker’s dollar-sign nail-art) and ribbon tats beneath her buttocks. Through always-aggressive Ani, Baker adopts global hip-hop cynicism and lingo, shifting that exploitative culture into global debauchery. Hipsters who praise Anora (and Eliza Hittman’s Beach Rats and the similarly chaotic Safdie brothers worldview) are ignorant of Ice Cube’s 1996 directorial debut The Players Club, a superior version of the stripper culture that Baker panders to — and Ice Cube never pitied his heroine as damaged goods unable to connect to others.
Like Larry Clark, Baker approves taboo and mistakes outrage for rebellion. In that sense, Anora is a dreadful political farce. It’s the perfect film for the Kamala Harris campaign and the era of moral relativity in which we’re meant to sympathize with a sociopath’s self-interest and find it joyous, strong, and entertaining.
With Red Rocket, I identified Baker celebrating America as a nation of losers — a pessimism he confuses with Jonathan Demme and Robert Altman’s nonjudgmental panoramas — and Anora continues that decline with crass satirical manipulation. That’s why the anti-American Cannes festival hailed him. Teenagers might be the perfect audience for Anora’s nonsense, although you don’t want to expose teens to the film’s greed and sexual degradation — even if they recognize Ani’s psychological damage as their own.
