The Big Picture

Anora
tackles class exploitation in a darkly comedic tone, encapsulating the fundamental cruelty baked into our world.
The film portrays the harsh realities of modern labor, highlighting the never-ending struggle just for basic stability.
Sean Baker and Mikey Madison are each operating in complete sync, creating a shattering and poetic parable on exploitation that reveals the cold realities of our world.

Sean Baker’s latest feature, the thrilling and darkly comedic Anora, is about a great many things, with an outstanding breakout performance from Mikey Madison, but, at its core, it’s about class exploitation. Though it touches on things the filmmaker has explored before, be it the vulnerability of everyday people living in proximity to poverty in The Florida Project or the way those with smiling faces can take advantage of others for their own gain in Red Rocket, it proves to be his most searing, shattering work to date. Without ever losing its comedic edge, it morphs into one of the most honest yet heartbreaking portraits of the fundamental brokenness of our modern world. It’s as dynamic as it is dread-inducing, pushing things further and further until there is nothing left but the reality that whoever we think may win in this battle of wills surrounding a marriage, this is a game built so all of us end up losing.

Anora (2024) Release Date May 21, 2024 Director Sean Baker Cast Mikey Madison , Mark Eydelstein , Yuriy Borisov , Karren Karagulian , Vache Tovmasyan Runtime 139 Minutes Main Genre Drama Writers Sean Baker Studio(s) Cre Film , FilmNation Entertainment

While life has always been defined by the rich using up the value of the poor and then casting them aside, the most devastating part of Baker’s vision comes in witnessing the lack of solidarity being formed. Even as this could change things on a structural level, compassion and class solidarity are in short supply as, despite being united by our collective precarity, we all are often fighting for scraps rather than coming together. This is all played with a delicate yet no less devastating hand, never judging those who are failing to support each other, and instead mourning the fact that we all are being pitted against each other while the wealthy always continue to come out on top. As the world burns and we all struggle to get by, Anora is a clear-eyed indictment of the way the structures of society have calcified into cruelty, while those who get something sell out the people they should be uniting with. Whether it’s Baker’s best is hard to say, as he’s made many excellent films, but none as unflinching as this.

What Is ‘Anora’ About?
This begins with an excellent opening sequence where we get to know the charismatic and clever Ani (Madison) as she goes about her day in New York City. She is a sex worker who is scraping by, working long hours before taking the subway home to crash before waking up to do it all over again, day after day. She is the face of modern labor in America. Much like the underrated recent film Hustlers, Anora takes us into the reality of stripping and sex work as a job that most other movies often use as background noise. We see how Ani, whose real name is Anora, can’t ever seem to get out from under the crushing forces of inequality that keep in her place. No matter how hard she works, how good she is at her job, or how valuable her labor is to people, it never manages to be enough for even a moment of peace.

She has no healthcare, no union, and no stability. Thus, it seems like she may have caught a break when the imbecilic young Ivan (Mark Eydelshteyn) walks into the strip club where she works. Ani is called to dance for him as she is the only one who speaks Russian. He has lots of money, more than Ani could make over an entire lifetime, and spends it freely. When he invites her to spend more paid time with him, she says yes. Eventually, the two get married while on a whirlwind trip to Vegas. Then, everything starts to fall apart, tipping Ani’s life into chaos.

Baker, who also serves as the film’s co-editor, builds this naturally, splicing together montages of partying and revelry that inevitably feel too good to be true. As we soon learn, Ivan has money because he is the son of a Russian oligarch who is not happy to hear his son married someone of a lower class, let alone a sex worker. They then try to force the couple to annul their marriage, but before this can happen, Ivan takes off and leaves Ani alone with the men who have been tasked with fixing the family’s problem. The trio of Toros (Karren Karagulian), Garnick (Vache Tovmasyan), and Igor (Yura Borisov), similarly want to be there about as much as Ani does, though still carry on with the jobs that they’ve been given.

‘Aurora’ Is Both Thrilling and Tragic
After some uproarious scenes that are as electrifying and kinetic as anything Baker has ever done, a tentative bargain is struck. Essentially, Ani will help them find Ivan and get ten thousand dollars in exchange. She has other plans in mind, but there is still nothing to be done until they can all find him. The humor to all of this is never in short supply, as the jokes about the dark absurdity of the whole situation fly out left and right, although it soon becomes more quietly haunting when we realize how the deck is stacked. No matter what any of them do, it is almost certain that all of them, Toros, Garnick, Igor, and Ani, are going to come out still struggling while Ivan and his family get to continue accumulating immense wealth while putting this all behind them. This can feel like a bit of a tonal shift, as it goes from being a more madcap journey to something more melancholic, but the reality is that this feeling was always there. Though Ani thought she had found a way out of her situation, with the scene of her saying farewell to all her fellow workers at the strip club becoming terribly tragic in retrospect, there remain structural reasons why people stay locked in cycles of poverty.

This is where the film finds a beautiful balance, with Madison and Baker operating completely in sync. When it comes to cinematic collaborators, one can only hope this is the first of many. From the very jump, Madison perfectly embodies all the complicated layers of Ani. She is a powerful performer with both the necessary patience and presence to hold every scene in her hands, no matter how chaotic they may get. Never once does it feel like the film is valorizing her as some sort of perfect person, instead showing how she is deeply flawed and fearful under the exterior confidence she brings to survive her life of working.

We don’t know where she came from other than a brief reference to having family in Florida. These are presumably people she hasn’t seen in quite some time, both because she rarely mentions them and is rarely shown not working. Madison expertly captures all the vulgarity and visceral parts of Ani’s personality that she has built as armor for herself as she does this just as we begin to see it starting to crack. Baker is similarly attuned to every single moment of her stunning performance, letting the small moments linger until they all accumulate into something substantively shattering. Many of these involve flashes of cruelty from Ivan that Ani doesn’t speak out against, hyper-aware of just who has the leverage in both their relationship and the world. This is all because she has had to be. It’s her against the world.

‘Anora’ Is a Painfully Poetic Portrait of Modern Exploitation
Image via Cannes

Baker has an eye for capturing how people like him can be reckless and rude, whereas everyone else around him must tread carefully. This is just the surface of the fundamentally unjust world we live in, but each moment cuts like a knife as it reminds us of just how comprehensive this is. It’s all played with subtlety as we observe how there is some small charm to Ivan that Ani is taken with, just as there is frankness in how quickly this can vanish. When push comes to shove, the wealthy will always have class solidarity whereas the rest of the world will need to accumulate much more of it to even have a shot at stability. Ivan will always have his family’s obscene amount of money to fall back on and, without calling attention to it, the entire film is about the inevitable march towards this reasserting itself. There is earned joy to the ways Baker constructs Ani and the crew stumbling through the chaos of the city, though the fact that they are all going to be again put back in their place by the unequal order of things soon drains out any such pleasures.

There will likely be comparisons made between this film and the work of the Safdie Brothers, with much of this middle feeling similar to Good Time, though it is in the downshift where Baker finds something distinct from that. Without taking away from its impact, one of the characters Ani rides around with comes increasingly into the forefront just as the wealthy world she found a way into fades away. We see how she responds with anger at this, throwing out hurtful insults as a way of coping, but eventually, she starts to fall more silent. It is this final stretch where the closing succession of scenes hit like a ton of bricks, proving to be a grim denouement in what could otherwise be a darkly chaotic romp. Gone are the excitement or thrills as the film becomes more reflective. As the vulnerability of the characters comes breaking through, we are left with them out in the cold. No matter what they do to try to keep warm together, the chilling and cruel realities of the world still won’t let them.

Anora (2024) REVIEWAnora is Sean Baker’s most searing and shattering film yet with a breakout performance from Mikey Madison.ProsThe film is a painfully poetic portrait of modern exploitation, proving to be as dynamic as it is devastating.Sean Baker builds everything naturally, creating a sense early on that much is too good to be true before bringing the hammer down.Mikey Madison perfectly embodies the many layers of Ani, expertly holding every scene in her hands.The closing succession of scenes hits like a ton of bricks, proving to be a grim yet honest final note.

Anora had its World Premiere at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival.