Anora review: Sean Baker's high wire and rambunctious fable invigorates a startlingly wise and tender tale of decadence

In this review, aryantalksfilm aka Aryan Vyas discusses the Cannes winner and MAMI's closing film, Sean Baker's Anora.

Most of Sean Baker's films drive controversy, not because his leads are flawed and self-defeating. But because they precariously dare to walk a tightrope of reflecting the deterrents around them while honouring their self-worth and perseverance. His protagonists are people from the fringes desperately trying to make the American dream work until they come head-on with its dreary limitations. That's also why they never come across as one dimensional, primarily because Baker's narrative sensibility governs his rambunctious visual style; his core thematics then goes onto defy the narrative through execution. In that style emerges the rare ability to embrace the everyday details of his not-so-extraordinary characters. People who often get watched more than they deserve to be seen.

Perhaps that's what makes Anora the film he had always been hurtling to make. Shot on a 35mm film by cinematographer Drew Daniels and edited by Baker himself, this 139-minute vivacious drama feels as slick and swift as any contemporary film shot on a digital camera. But more than anything, it enables him to delineate Ani — the diminutive name Anora prefers for her name — in a way that never feels remotely vindictive. A stripper who works seven days a week at a Midtown Manhattan club, Ani also takes clients on the side as an escort.

She speaks passable Russian in the most American way possible, as she justifies a new client because her grandmother never learned English. That new client is Ivan (Mark Eydelshteyn), aka Vanya, who seeks to spend his money on yet another potentially drug-fueled night of his. The seemingly transnational and glitzy night the two share soon unravels into the longest night of their lives, till Vanya eventually persuades Ani to become his girlfriend for a week. All sorts of ketamine-loaded, high-key moments of slapstick banter pass by while the look in Ani's eyes implicates she’s not just taking this to be another business deal. The countless times after they have sex in Vanya's palatial family mansion, the two go to Las Vegas. Here, he proposes to her after a post-sex repose, saying how it'd get him a US green card and allow him to disband his father's ultimate plan of calling him back to join his business empire back in Russia. She haggles first, then agrees as the implications become a gleeful aspiration. She's more mature and less naive than her deep-pocketed potential husband, and while Ani recognizes Ivan for what he is, they get lost in blinkered thoughts of what their life together could be. 

But while she is a smart businesswoman who knows what cash can mean, Vanya, meanwhile, is yet another hyper-juvenile nepo baby who may never be smart enough to qualify into a mature adult. As it turns out, the word of Vanya getting hitched to 'a prostitute' slowly trickles out thousands of miles away. Before she could fully get sober to breathe luxury right after moving out of her Brighton Beach neighbourhood, Vanya’s father’s goons (played by Karren Karagulian, Vache Tovmasyan and the truly extraordinary Yura Borisov) show up at the front door. Along with that also comes the crushing reality knocking in on how theirs might not be a perfect love story.

It's here where Anora comes of age in its storytelling and tonal prowess; after emulating the highwire mood of Howard Hawks films, the film, in its second half, bears more resemblance to the observational quality peculiar to Altman until it finally cracks upon the complex realities of suburban livelihoods in the cold misty snow of New York. What first feels rollicking and like the start of a luxurious union becomes more of a realist drama that turns startlingly tender.

Also Read: All We Imagine As Light review: The search for intimacy amidst a sea of turbulence

Baker's ability to reveal specific truths of his characters' daily lives without romanticizing the world around them has always been his strongest pursuit. Here, though, the very quest of chasing down one of the leads reveals the fragility of the societal demarcations. The inviolable vow the couple makes runs in contrast with the room Anora later finds herself in. That's what informs the feeling that the members of this unhinged foursome later share, silently realizing they are more aligned with each other than they are with the oligarchical powers pulling their strings. 

The movie's soundscape here slips from diegetic to non-diegetic, aligning not just the foursome with each other but also with our worlds. Anora progressively dresses up in more layers of clothes as she gradually becomes more vulnerable. Every errant glance she takes in front of the camera reinforces the unspoken feeling she's harbouring inside—an expanding avalanche of epithets that pave the way for Baker's heartwrenching endings.

By the end, then, has Anora deluded herself into a life of far-fetched excesses, or does she thrive for it, knowing it's the only possible way for someone to look at her in a non-objectifiable way? If so, what does that look like with someone as immature of a brat as Vanya? The inescapable reality of real power isn't in submitting to it, rather, as Baker's humanism suggests, it's in confronting it! 

Anora had its Indian premiere at MAMI Mumbai Film Festival this year. 

For more reviews, follow us on @socialketchupbinge