Sean Baker’s comedy about a Brooklyn stripper who marries an oligarch’s son is fast, loud and much funnier than its premise suggests, and Mikey Madison carries every minute of it. The middle hour runs about twenty minutes long. We recommend it anyway.
Ani (Mikey Madison) works at a strip club in Brooklyn and is fetched over to a booth because she speaks some Russian. Ivan (Mark Eydelshteyn) is the son of a Russian oligarch, and lives alone in a mansion by the water with a games console and no supervision. He hires her for a week, the week ends with a marriage, and then his parents find out. Sean Baker wrote, directed and edited Anora, and it is very good: the funniest thing he has made, with one clear flaw, which is that it is 139 minutes long and about twenty of those are the same scene.
The first stretch is the courtship, and Baker the editor cuts it as one long rush of parties, a jet, fireworks and a bed. Drew Daniels keeps the camera on Ani rather than on the money, so she is the thing you look at in every room. Stephen Phelps’s production design makes Ivan’s house look bought rather than lived in, and Jocelyn Pierce’s costumes tell you who has money before anyone speaks.
Then Toros (Karren Karagulian), sent by Ivan’s family to deal with the marriage, arrives with Garnik (Vache Tovmasyan) and Igor (Yura Borisov). What happens in that sitting room is the funniest sustained stretch we have sat through in a long while. Ani does not go quietly. Somebody’s nose goes, somebody is bitten, a lamp does not survive, and Baker holds the shots long enough that the men’s exhaustion becomes part of the joke. We laughed for the better part of twenty minutes, and somewhere in the middle we noticed that Ani was frightened and had been for a while, and the laughing stopped being comfortable. Baker does not underline this. He lets it sit.
Madison plays Ani loud and quick, Brooklyn vowels at full volume, and never once asks us to feel sorry for her. Her best moments are the half-seconds in which she decides whether to charm somebody or hit them. Eydelshteyn plays Ivan as a boy: he backflips onto beds, treats everything as a game he can quit, and is on his phone whenever anyone wants something from him. Borisov, as Igor, says almost nothing and watches everything, and his is the performance we kept looking at when the others were shouting.
The flaw is the middle hour, a night spent driving round the city and asking questions in shops and restaurants. Baker the editor is less strict than Baker the director. Toros shouting into a phone, Garnik holding his face, Ani telling everyone exactly what she thinks of them: each is funny the first time and still funny the second, and by the fourth we were checking the time. Darya Ekamasova and Aleksey Serebryakov arrive late as Ivan’s parents and are excellent and brief, and we wanted more of them and less of the car.
Baker has spent his career on people who sell some part of themselves, in Tangerine and Red Rocket among others, and this is his most straightforwardly entertaining film. It is Pretty Woman with the sums shown. Everyone here has a price, Ani included, and the film neither sneers at that nor pretends it is romantic. The last scene, which we will not describe, is done almost without dialogue, and it left us silent in a way two hours of noise had not prepared us for.
It is an 18 certificate and it earns it in the first half hour, where the sex is frequent and filmed as work rather than as spectacle. See it with someone who laughs out loud, and skip the trailers if you can, because they give away most of the sitting room.
