Mucking with Movies: ‘Anora’

I’ve been to a strip club once in my life, and it was only before then that I mocked people who fell in love with on-duty strippers. Once I was inside with a stack of singles and hope in my heart, the dancer wrapped her long legs around the brass pole while laying back, so that all her hair spilled over. I could see the full breadth of her dragon tattoo stretching from breast to leg.

Then I understood. 

With this limited in-person research, I went to check out “Anora,” a film I have been looking forward to seeing since I first came across the trailer. The newest project from certified modern film great Sean Baker, the titular character is played by Mikey Madison in a breakout performance. A young stripper with an escorting side hustle, she is swept away when Russian oligarch heir and playboy manchild Ivan (Mark Eydelshteyn) shows up at the club she dances at and asks for somebody who can speak Russian. Hijinks ensue.

Baker begins his film boldly, with a tracking shot on g-string strung strippers giving lap dances in their respective VIP rooms that ends with a medium close of Anora’s occupying the left half of the screen. In addition to being the perfect transgressiveness to expand his audience’s pallet, it immediately establishes that he will be working a fly-on-the-wall directorial style for “Anora.”

It is not a far departure from his stylings in his earlier celebrated flicks “The Florida Project” and “Tangerine,” but the biggest difference here is how dissociative it all feels. “The Florida Project” and “Tangerine” felt deeply, almost frighteningly intimate in even their most radical moments, but in “Anora,” Baker refuses to be obtrusive in any way. He is an observer, framing everybody in the right spot on a technical level, so that as an audience we feel as removed from the lives as the characters feel from theirs. A powerlessness runs like an electric current through all the principal characters, unhappy at where they have ended up in their lives and incapable of changing it for one external factor or another. The only ones with total autonomy are Ivan’s parents, who wouldn’t consider their employees and their son’s new bride pawns. They are playing a different game entirely. 

Baker slowly plays this reveal on why Ivan’s handlers are willing to put up with all the hijinks that accompany taking care of Ivan. The goon trio isn’t introduced until the second act, where Baker deftly backdoors his script’s call to action as not the marriage between Anora and Ivan but rather Ivan’s escape from his family’s mansion. It’s a brilliant bait-and-switch for a film that is continuously unpredictable. It may seem like an odd comparison, but the film that feels most closely aligned with “Anora” would be “Pulp Fiction.” Both are an homage to many genres but, at their core, are dark comedies with high drama premises whose story is predicated upon a series of simple stories with one big wrinkle thrown in.

At times, “Anora” is the battiest romcom you will ever watch in your life; in other sequences, it is a chase-down thriller done at low speed, and then, at times, you feel like you’re watching one of those movies where the main protagonist is its location. In the quest to find Ivan, we are taken through almost every New York City bureau, including the highly multicultural elements that support them all. 

But Baker’s best work is done with the principal character, Igor, who starts off seemingly as a meaningless goon but quickly becomes the film’s most important character with very little dialogue. Played by Yura Borisov, he should win every award for best-supporting actor in every film award ceremony. To be so regularly featured for your acting rather than your speaking is every actor’s dream role, and Borisov makes the most of his character’s silence. Baker features his face frequently, even early on when you’re not sure why. Why is the sidekick goon, seemingly the third most important Ivan babysitter, getting so much screen time? Ivan combines his parsed-back facial expressions with genuine, hilarious delivery on one-liners, creating a three-dimensional character that is sneakily the pivot point for the film. 

Maybe ten minutes too long, “Anora” still ends how it should. Sad, angry, and quiet, with all pretense stripped away. Anora is finally able to see herself as she should — warts and all. It is that clarity that finally gives her the emotional release she, and the audience, have been searching for. 

Critic score: 9.2/10

Jack Simon is a mogul coach and writer/director who enjoys eating food he can’t afford, traveling to places out of his budget, and creating art about skiing, eating, and traveling while broke. Check out his website jacksimonmakes.com to see his Jack’s Jitney travelogue series. You can email him at jackdocsimon@gmail.com for inquiries of any type.