The sheer dexterity of Sean Baker’s Anora, Palme d’Or winner and surefire Best Picture contender, is unlike anything the awards circuit has had to contend with since Bong Joon Ho’s Parasite – as raunchy as it is soft to the touch, as vulgar as it is silently devastating, this total knockout is equal parts Uncut Gems and classic Hollywood melodrama; yet another unforgettable film from the best working director in the industry today.
Anora follows its titular character of the same name (Mikey Madison) – a sex worker who marries Ivan (Mark Eydelshteyn), the billionaire son of a Russian oligarch, after spending the week as his girlfriend-for-hire.
Baker, often referred to as the working-class filmmaker, continues his decades-long obsession with sex work – from the transgender LA street-scorts in iPhone-shot Tangerine to Simon Rex’s disillusioned pornstar in Red Rocket – and this latest outing is as explicit and as uncompromising as we’ve come to expect from the Jersey-born director, and then some. Never before has he been so deft or seamless with his camera; a creative of such remarkable bravura that he inexplicably makes art seem simple.
Palme d’Or winner Sean Baker has a nice ring to it. pic.twitter.com/M4CcmwvR7d
— Anora (@AnoraFilm) May 25, 2024
It opens to an EDM remix of Take That’s Greatest Day; an endless row of nude, contorting strippers unravelling across the screen. At the end is Anora herself, sweaty but smiling – braced to stalk any suitor that catches her eye in the dingy interior of this Brooklyn club. After being asked to provide Ivan with comfort due to her knowledge of Russian, their arrangement morphs into an escorting service outside of club hours.
The tragedy of Baker’s film, and the cruel irony of this soundtrack, is that Anora’s ‘Greatest Day’ is the brief taste of a life she’s never dared, or had the luxury of being able, to dream about – as fleeting as the smoke that perforates the room when her and Ivan exchange joints and e-cigarettes. In a career-defining turn from Madison, the actress’s body becomes a canvas for expression, from frenetic twerk performances over Russian hip-hop to racy sex acts with Ivan.
Anora plays the role of a lifetime, sinking into the Russian’s extravagant lifestyle like an obese man into a waterbed. She isn’t just performing for Ivan out of financial necessity, but survival, clinging to the temporality of their situation with a passion that seeps into and becomes inseparable from the mask she wears as an escort. And if Emma Stone’s 2023 Oscar win showed us anything, in a film chock-full of similarly explicit material, it’s that Madison stands a serious chance to also overcome the Academy’s age-old bias against horror and sex-focused cinema.
This is less about romance than it is about struggle; Anora is a thinly-veiled melodrama occupied with class dichotomy, hiding behind the initial facade of an NC-17 sex-fest. Like all of Baker’s filmography, Anora is about how far we’ll go to take what’s ours. The question, like always, remains the same: but what will this take from us?
Featured image: The cast and crew of Anora at the Toronto Film Festival. Xfranksun, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
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