A Second Look at Anora

If you have time for just one review, make it Aaron Schuster’s for e-flux—but read it only after you’ve seen the film. Schuster delves into the “profoundly ambiguous and enigmatic” ending, a final scene that has left some baffled and others enthralled. For 4Columns film editor Melissa Anderson, Baker’s eighth feature “may be the most madcap of his projects to date—yet one that, by its final act, edges a little too closely to mawkishness.” But for Schuster, Anora ends with “a scene of subjective breakdown which registers all the more powerfully the titular character’s ethical dignity.”

Schuster draws parallels between Anora and two other films, both Cinderella stories. In Gary Marshall’s Pretty Woman (1990), a corporate raider (Richard Gere) picks up a hooker (Julia Roberts) on Hollywood Boulevard, while in Pyotr Todorovsky’s Intergirl (Interdevochka, 1989), a Swedish executive (Tomas Laustiola) asks a Leningrad prostitute (Elena Yakovleva) to marry him. Pretty Woman ends happily, Intergirl tragically, and Anora falls somewhere in between.

“Cinematographically,” writes Schuster, “they are all loving portraits of their respective cities, Los Angeles, Leningrad, and New York. It’s almost as if one needed the perspective of the sex worker to grasp the true beauty of urban space—and Baker’s films, if nothing else, are incredible walks (and drives) through urban undersides. Narratively, if Pretty Woman is an American fantasy, and Interdevochka a Soviet morality tale, twenty-first century Anora is about both Russia and America; or rather, it’s a story of the Soviet diaspora in the United States.”

Mikey Madison’s turn as Anora, a Brighton Beach exotic dancer who prefers to be called Ani, “marks the arrival of a full-blown movie star,” writes Slate’s Dana Stevens. Vanya (Mark Eydelshteyn), the son of a Russian oligarch, is smitten and whisks her off to his mansion, to parties, and eventually to Las Vegas, where, practically on a whim, they marry. Vanya’s parents (Aleksei Serebryakov and Darya Ekamasova) are appalled and send three heavies—Igor (Yura Borisov), Toros (Karren Karagulian), and Garnick (Vache Tovmasyan)—to annul the marriage and bring Vanya back into the fold.

“Like other towering filmic dames—think Gloria (1980) or Erin Brockovich (2000)—Ani holds Anora’s center,” writes Beatrice Loayza in the Nation. “She is the film’s moral core, its source of defiance, justice, and resilience.” Vulture’s Bilge Ebiri points out that Ani and the three heavies “are, in the end, disposable to those with power and money. They each serve a purpose and can be discarded at whim. That too adds to the frenetic energy of the film: For all its charm, Anora is a movie in which just about everybody’s fighting for survival, and they only ever manage to succeed when they start working together. Baker has made a number of pictures about sex workers, and he dedicated his award at Cannes to them. Why is he so fascinated with such settings and characters? I suspect it’s because their world crystallizes the transactional nature of so much of our lives.”

“From a craft perspective,” writes Dana Stevens, “Anora is a marvel: Shot on 35 mm film by the cinematographer Drew Daniels (It Comes at Night, Waves) and edited by Baker himself, it moves fluidly through a series of indoor and outdoor settings, creating a separate yet coherent visual language for every sequence: music video–style chaos in the hard-partying Vegas scenes, Edward Hopper–esque melancholy in the nighttime journey through Brighton Beach, and, in a shot seen through the plate-glass windows of Vanya’s mansion, a contemplative, almost painterly vision of the rocky Long Island coastline under falling snow.”

“The ticking-clock structure is straight out of classic Hollywood comedies, albeit updated for an age of champagne rooms and private jets,” writes Sean Burns for WBUR. “Baker stages Anora with a precise, screwball snap, like when a catfight breaks out at the strip club and there’s a shot of half a dozen dancers leaping off the laps of the stockbrokers they’re servicing like divers in a Busby Berkeley water musical.” Baker’s “also got something of the late Jonathan Demme’s affection for bit players. There are no ‘extras’ in Sean Baker films, as everyone in front of the camera appears to have wandered in from a full and bustling life outside the frame.”

The New Yorker’s Richard Brody senses “a significant work of art lurking within Anora, but it’s confined within the limits of a potboiler,” and at Reverse Shot, A. G. Sims suggests that Baker’s films—particularly Starlet (2012), Tangerine (2015), Red Rocket (2021), and now, Anora—“collectively approaching something like a sexploitation genre unto itself, seem to be trying to split the difference between Hollywood and raw grassroots guerrilla cinema, landing on a kind of pop realism that feels aesthetically uniquely his, if hollow at the core.” But for Jessica Kiang in Sight and Sound, Anora, “by turns swoony, funny, panicky, and sad,” is Baker’s “most vivid creation yet.”