Review: Oscar-winning film Anora is a tough, terrific working-girl saga

Mikey Madison as Ani and Mark Eydelshteyn as Vanya in Anora. Photo / Neon

Who can turn the world on with her smile? Who can take a nothing day and suddenly make it all seem worthwhile? In the 1970s, it was Mary Richards, as played by Mary Tyler Moore, who was America’s sweetheart. In the 1990s, Julia Roberts took pop culture by storm as the happy hooker of Pretty Woman, a fable of Wall Street princes and conspicuous consumption.

We live in a different and darker landscape in the 21st century, an America where you are what you’re paid - ‘twas ever thus, but it’s impossible to deny it now without looking like a mark - and there may be no more fitting sweetheart for our moment than Ani (Mikey Madison), the foul-mouthed, bighearted New York stripper of Sean Baker’s phenomenal crowd-pleaser, Anora.

The movie, a top prizewinner at Cannes in May, is the latest Baker opus to look at the tragicomedy of daily life through the lens of sex work, which the writer-director perceives and portrays without glamour but with a level, empathetic gaze for the realities of the gig economy. Baker’s breakthrough was the shot-on-a-cellphone Tangerine (2015), about a pair of transgender sex workers, and his follow-up was The Florida Project (2017), about a little girl with a trick-turning mother living in the shadow of Disney World. The illusory promises of the magic kingdom are very much the subject of all Baker’s work.

That includes the farcical Red Rocket (2021), whose hustling horndog of a male porn star scraped a lot of people’s last nerve. Anora finds the director back in what only seems like more comfortable territory, with its realistic take on its title character’s 9-to-5 life (pm to am instead of the usual way around). The movie is superficially a comedy - and ultimately a love story, just not the one we think - but there’s a great deal of striving and sadness beneath its layers of glitter and soot and, beyond that, the exhaustion that comes from slowly admitting to yourself that the doors of the kingdom will almost certainly never open for you.

Ani - her real name is Anora, and she’s the grandchild of Russian immigrants - lives in Brooklyn’s Brighton Beach and takes the long B-train ride to Midtown Manhattan, where she works at a club called Headquarters and gives lap dances to businessmen and stag-party bros, plying them with overpriced, watered-down champagne. It’s a job, no more and no less, and, as a wise woman once sang, she works hard for the money. When a gangly Russian college-age kid named Vanya (Mark Eydelshteyn) comes in with a thick wad of bills to spend, Ani - who speaks enough of the language to get by - is assigned to babysit him.

Out of this a romance grows, or something like it, because Ani is still young and naive enough to believe that even if you can’t fall in love, you can at least buy into it, and because Vanya is a sweet-natured idiot with the entitlement and gaudy, absurd wealth of an oligarch’s son. The early scenes of Anora are charming and sex-besotted, as Vanya purchases Ani’s favours for a week - hey, just like Richard Gere did in Pretty Woman! - and installs her in an airy mansion in the Five Towns principality of Long Island.

Backstage at the club in Anora. Photo / Neon

It’s not spoiling anything to say that the two get along like kids on a hormone-soaked playdate, that Vanya’s luxe lifestyle IS romance to a young woman who still lives in a run-down house with room-mates, and that an impulsive trip on Dad’s private jet to Las Vegas results in a situation that sounds the alarm klaxons back in Moscow. At which point Anora becomes an edgy, slapstick comedy of outrage, and the outrage is Ani’s at seeing her paradise so abruptly dismantled.

The oligarch has stateside minders keeping an eye on his son, a trio of supposed tough guys led by Vanya’s godfather, an Armenian priest named Toros (Karren Karagulian), who has to interrupt a baptism to tend to this new emergency. Toros has a burly brother named Garnick (Vache Tovmasyan), and just to make sure that Vanya is brought to heel and his presumed gold digger dispensed with, they’ve brought along some Russian muscle named Igor (Yura Borisov). But these three have never met anyone like Hurricane Ani, the stripper scorned, and the centrepiece of Anora, an extended funny/scary living-room siege, is staged for maximum screwball even as we’re asked to consider what it looks like from a terrified woman’s point of view.

A word about Mikey Madison in this movie: wonderful. Okay, a few more words about her portrayal of Ani: Heartsore. Headstrong. Self-possessed. Nobody’s victim. The comedy of the back half of Anora - which ambles around Brooklyn for much too long and too noisily in search of awol Vanya - is that Ani is as furious at herself for buying into the dream as she is at these three stooges whom she berates, bloodies and abuses into exasperation and awe.

Madison first came to attention as Pamela Adlon’s oldest daughter, Max, in Better Things and had small roles in Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood (2019) and Scream (2022), both of which dispatched her characters with extreme prejudice. One of the greater satisfactions of Anora is seeing Ani take charge of a situation in which she’s supposed to be collateral damage. Madison uses her liquid eyes and wary, rubbery smile not to win us over a la Julia Roberts but to show how Ani sheds her illusions and comes to understand both her own power and the larger powerlessness of a working woman in a world run by men and boys and money.

Vache Tovmasyan as Garnick and Yura Borisov as Igor. Photo / Neon

That revelation fills Ani with righteous comic fury, the kind an audience is prompted to cheer. But Baker, as ever, is playing a more complicated game, and only as Anora rolls on do she and we acknowledge she’s being crushed as well. Before the final scene - a moment as emotionally wrenching and multilayered as any you’ll see on a screen this year - it’s clear that Ani’s ferocity, a sex worker’s insistence that she *matters* as a human being, has won her grudging admirers. If that only serves to increase her value in the marketplace for a day or two, she’ll take it. You are what you’re paid.

I said Anora is a love story, though, and I’ll save you the pleasure of discovering what I mean by that. It involves a character and a performance that constitute a slowly dawning act of graciousness, but it could also be just another illusion, this one of romance and the kind of happy endings found in fairy tales rather than Ani’s usual line of work. Anora is a movie to argue over - the post-film conversations among couples are going to be fierce - but Baker leaves the most important questions for us to hash out. What’s the price of a pretty woman? What are the prices paid BY her? And what would a world look like if there were no prices at all?

Three and one-half stars. Rated R. At theaters. Contains strong sexual content throughout, graphic nudity, pervasive language and drug use. 139 minutes.

Rating guide: Four stars masterpiece, three stars very good, two stars okay, one star poor, no stars waste of time.

Anora is in select New Zealand cinemas now. It is also available to rent or buy on Apple TV, Prime Video, Google TV and YouTube.