For some stories there is still probably no better place than New York. The distance between central Manhattan and the Brighton Beach metropolitan area at the southernmost end of Brooklyn could be covered by train in just under half an hour, but not much more than the rail network connects the two parts of the city. In Sean Baker‘s film of the same name, Anora (Mikey Madison) commutes this route every day between her work as a lap dance dancer in one of the numerous strip clubs in Midtown, which have been celebrating a tourism renaissance as so-called “gentlemen’s clubs” since the 2020s, and one directly brick house built on the railway line, which she lives with her sister, in order to be able to reduce the rental costs somewhat. She prefers to call herself Ani because she has no connection with the Russian origin of her first name. She doesn’t speak Russian, she tells a customer who can only communicate in broken English, but she would understand the language. However, the roots of names that point to the past no longer have any real meaning in the USA anyway.
Customer is perhaps saying too much: Vanya (Mark Eydelshteyn) seems to have gotten lost in the club, drunk and excited, floundering between languages. But then the news may soon be too little said, because things are germinating between Anora and him something that doesn’t need words and did not subside when the alcohol left the bloodstream. The next day he invites her to the holiday home of his parents, notoriously mythical Russian oligarchs, as Anora googled, who enable their son to have an extended holiday on the American east coast.
Vanya has a youthful swag that seems seductive, a nonchalance and insouciance that seem innate. He slides across the stone tiles of his villa in his socks and, when he and Anora finally have sex, somersaults into bed. He’s 21, she’s 23, a difference of not too many months, but that’s true through different levels of experience is solidified: If Anora talks to him, she weighs things up, assesses his needs, has to negotiate. He wants to spend a whole week with her – and the film openly and with obvious enjoyment borrows from Garry Marshall’s “Pretty Woman” – and pay her for it. 10,000 dollars is said to be the exchange value, which Anora increases to 15,000.
She is a character like the one Simon Rex recently played in Baker’s previous film “Red Rocket”: sex workers whose negotiating skills and wit give them a visible dignity that hardly anyone in society wants to grant them. With curious observation and empathy, Baker tells of these characters, between comedy and melodrama oscillating, in technicolor-like colors and widescreen settings, without slipping into an overly artificial exaggeration.
“Today this could be the greatest day of our lives” is the motto of the unwaveringly insistent piano chords in a song by Take That, which sounds like a leitmotif again and again in “Anora”. On a private jet trip to Las Vegas, Vanya and Anora decide to get married in order to get Vanya a green card that will free him from having to return to Russia. When the camera floats through the rain of lights in Vegas after the wedding, but always in almost intrusive proximity remains with the two lovers, it seems for a moment as if the attraction between two people could be more attractive than all the attractions of the most brightly lit city in the world. As quickly as he appeared, Vanya disappears again: When his parents find out about the marriage, they book a flight to New York to force him to annul the marriage. Vanya escapes and runs away, Anora, forced by his family, sets out to search.
Similar to “Uncut Gems” by Josh and Benny Safdie, a film that also drew its verve and dynamism from its precise knowledge of New York’s topography, “Anora” imitates the intensity strategies of New Hollywood cinema, be it in the editing structure or a penchant for hectic close-ups and the flared grain of analogue film material. Throughout his stories, Baker proves himself to be convinced advocate of medium-budget genre cinemawhich draws its urgency from a passionate knowledge of film history. As a colorful love affair, an urban night odyssey and, in the end, an almost childishly silly criminal grotesque, “Anora” is a film whose impulses strive in opposite directions and sometimes hardly seem to find their way back to a center. Perhaps the same thing applies to him as it does to a train ride through New York: the euphoric happiness lies more in covering a long distance than in actually finding a connection.
Kamil Moll
Anora – USA 2024 – Director: Sean Baker – Cast: Mikey Madison, Mark Eydelshteyn, Yura Borisov, Karren Karagulian, Vache Tovmasyan – Running time: 139 minutes.
