{"id":10498,"date":"2024-11-21T08:00:00","date_gmt":"2024-11-21T13:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/?p=10498"},"modified":"2025-04-16T20:40:51","modified_gmt":"2025-04-17T00:40:51","slug":"10498","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/2024\/11\/21\/10498\/","title":{"rendered":"Anora."},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Writer\/director Sean Baker has carved out a niche for himself with stories about sex workers that rely on a small number of well-developed characters and a strong element of time and place. Anora<\/em> is his biggest film to date, showing that his eye for character and mood translate well even when the stakes of the story are much higher.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Anora is the given name of Ani (Mikey Madison), an exotic dancer at the club HQ in New York whose life is turned upside down when Vanya, the son of a Russian oligarch, shows up in the club, asking for a girl who speaks Russian and throwing around $100 bills. Vanya is 21, seldom sober, and living the high life, often literally, on his father\u2019s ruble. He buys a week of Ani\u2019s time, flies to Las Vegas with her and several friends, and then marries her at a Vegas chapel, complete with a 3-carat ring. The fun and games end when one of Vanya\u2019s handlers tells him that Vanya\u2019s parents are flying to the U.S. for force an annulment and bring the prodigal son back to Russia to join his father\u2019s business, taking the film in a darkly comic direction that only further underscores how little agency Ani has in her own life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ani is a flawed heroine, looking out for herself at every turn because it\u2019s clear no one else would; she\u2019s 23 and effectively on her own, living with her older sister, with a mother in Florida who appears to be absent from her life and no mention of any other family. Ani squabbles with her boss and some of the other dancers over mostly petty matters, but when she\u2019s cornered, she\u2019s vicious \u2013 often appropriately so \u2013 because she has so little to call her own. She lives a precarious existence, both in finances and in safety, as most sex workers do, a fact that is only underscored when Vanya\u2019s handlers, including the amoral Orthodox priest Toros, show up and force her to help them find the fugitive Vanya in a mad and often funny chase across the city. When the resolution comes, Ani takes control in the only way left available to her, although in the end it becomes clear to her (and the audience) just how little she has.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Each of Baker\u2019s prior two films revolved around a strongly written character played extremely well, with a plot good enough to move the pieces along and get the character to the right conclusion. Ani is just as well-written as The Florida Project<\/em>\u2019s Mooney or Red Rocket<\/em>\u2019s Mikey, and Madison gives the best performance of the trio, but the story does suffer a little under the strain of the second half. The plot strains credulity at a few points to either increase Ani\u2019s helplessness or to amp up the comedic aspects, although the courtroom scene \u2013 one of those less believable moments \u2013 did deliver some big laughs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Baker\u2019s The Florida Project<\/em><\/a> was my favorite film of 2017, and his follow-up Red Rocket<\/em><\/a> made my top ten in 2021, but neither received the plaudits that Anora<\/em> has so far. The film won the Palme d\u2019Or at Cannes this year and is atop most of the Oscar prediction lists right now (although it\u2019s still early days), while Madison appears to be a strong favorite to win Best Actress. I\u2019ve seen just four of the Best Picture contenders, and this is easily the best, but I wouldn\u2019t be surprised at all if I see something better. It isn\u2019t up to the level of The Florida Project<\/em>, and is more ambitious than Red Rocket<\/em> without the latter\u2019s taut story. Madison, though, is a revelation \u2013 I\u2019ve never seen her before, but other than her overdone Noo Yawk accent, she\u2019s delivers the kind of performance that deserves all of the awards. The contrast between Madison\u2019s tiny stature and Ani\u2019s big, smart-assed, and foul-mouthed personality perfectly encapsulates the struggle the character faces as a woman in a misogynistic world, working in an even more misogynistic industry, trying to make a living in what may be the only way available to her.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Anora<\/em> lacks some of the stronger secondary characters who popped up in Baker\u2019s previous two films as well, making this even more of a character study than either of them was. Mark Eydelshteyn plays Vanya as a Russian cosplaying as a louche Timoth\u00e9e Chalamet, and the character turns out to be disappointingly one-note and is usurped in the second half by the film\u2019s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern of Garnick and Igor. Vanya\u2019s parents, especially his mother, are caricatures. Even Toros, who contributes some humorous moments because of his desperation to get the marriage annulled before Vanya\u2019s parents walk off the plane, literally leaving in the middle of a baptism to go find him, turns out to be just craven, nothing more.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Which ultimately adds up to Anora <\/em>being merely very, very good, when Baker has been transcendent before. Mikey Madison takes a great character and plays it to the hilt, keeping you on her side even when you don\u2019t like or understand what she\u2019s doing, in a performance that will probably see me actively rooting for her to win everything this winter. I wish the characters around her were more interesting and less idiotic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Writer\/director Sean Baker has carved out a niche for himself with stories about sex workers that rely on a small number of well-developed characters and a strong element of time and place. Anora is his biggest film to date, showing that his eye for character and mood translate well even when the stakes of the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[1417,1448,1445,1449,1440,1442,161,215],"class_list":["post-10498","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-2024-movies","tag-2025-best-actress-nominees","tag-2025-best-director-nominees","tag-2025-best-original-screenplay-nominees","tag-2025-best-picture-nominees","tag-2025-best-supporting-actor-nominees","tag-highly-recommended","tag-movies","entry"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10498","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10498"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10498\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10653,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10498\/revisions\/10653"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10498"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10498"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10498"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}