ANORA: Review

Anora, who goes by Ani, works at a strip joint, doing laps. One night the boss comes in and asks for her to work a customer as she speaks Russian. He, Vanya, is young and cute and ready to party. He asks for her again and soon it becomes a habit. It's all sex, beats, Gameboys and drugs and then in a Vegas hotel room, in the depths of multi-faceted intoxication, he proposes marriage and after knocking it back as a joke she accepts. Their walk-in marriage ceremony reaches the outer protective human shell of Vanya's family who are billionaire oligarchs back home. Annie is not their idea of marriage material. When their operatives barge in, Vanya flees. They take Annie as collateral in their hunt for him, not quite getting how strong she really is.

Sean Baker's film is the New World Order as an urban road movie. After the Russians swapped dogma for a chaotic version of neo-liberalism and became harder to define, the notion of oligarchs as local warlords with global reach arose. Anora doesn't wipe that notion from the table (on the contrary) but does make gleeful use of it to tell a tale of the pursuit of personal integrity. Ani doesn't have qualms about her profession, she does fine by it, it's when it's weaponised by the thugs that it becomes a problem. While her union to Vanya wasn't as naïve as it looks to the family minders, her growing understanding of what they see as the stakes adds to a compelling complexity. She drives around in their car over a night on the Brooklyn streets knowing that she might not like what she finds at the end of the quest.

If you've seen the trailer you might think this is the kind of high calorie romp that the '90s made famous and, while it runs on some of that energy, it plays for smiles rather than laughs and keeps its eye firmly on the issues. Actually, if you've seen the trailer I'll offer the strange spoiler that the exciting remix of Blondie's Dreaming does not appear in the film. Baker is again, more interested in the themes of that song, as he was in the extraordinary The Florida Project: poverty and urban subsistence across the road from Disney World. And again, it works a treat.

Mikey Madison owns every frame of this film in the title role, even when off screen. She is the sober counterpart to the chaotic party monster Vanya, fearless when she knows the stakes are soaring, and fun as hell. Mark Eydelshteyn's Vanya is a beautiful young endorphin receptor who might either explode from a break in the constant hedonism or find a higher plain of existence by it. The more we know him the better we know which of those is more likely.  Karren Karagulian as the chief Armenian mobster has the most to do to redeem himself from monstrosity to humanity and it takes more than dialogue to do it. It's a ceaselessly energetic turn. More quietly but with funnier highlights is Yura Borisov as Igor, roped into the operation and increasingly aloof from it. His part in the moment of Ani's catharsis is profoundly moving.

Baker holds the whirlwind of plot and emotion he has created on a need to be firm basis. The film does drag a little here and there (I could have lived with a much shorter plane ride toward the end) but there is so much heart and humanity injected into the film that it feels part of the colour scheme. While it doesn't resemble either, I was emotively engaged the same way that I was when I first saw the Tarantinoesque multi-thread movies of the 2000s and the stronger films of Hal Hartley. If nostalgia, it's that: the longing for the feeling that decades old indy cinema used to warm us up by. I've missed it. Well, now it's here again and not a sly movie quote in sight.