‘Anora’ Review: A Screwball Cinderella Story from Brighton Beach
‘Anora’ (2024)
When Sean Baker won the Palme d’Or, the Cannes Film Festival’s highest honor, earlier this year for Anora, it was no surprise. The gleeful writer/director/editor leaned on the box in disbelief, aware that beneath him lay one of cinema’s most prestigious awards. He dedicated the honor to “all sex workers, past, present, and future.”
Baker, whose 2015 film Tangerine established him as an indie filmmaker to watch, has long focused on stories about sex workers striving to regain control over their lives. His characters are not necessarily heroes—even within their own stories—but instead, they’re individuals often ignored or cast in a negative light by society. Baker, working in a similar vein to John Schlesinger’s Midnight Cowboy, captures a raw, American reality, exposing the myth that anyone can live a picture-perfect life if they just work hard enough. It’s sometimes ugly, sometimes beautiful, but above all, it’s honest.
Anora is no exception to Baker’s filmography, yet it may be the defining work that cements him as an American auteur.
Following Ani (Mikey Madison), a sex worker and exotic dancer in New York City, Baker crafts a screwball comedy about a fantasy life turned sour. The film’s plot-heavy nature could have bogged down the underwritten characters, but Madison, along with newcomers Mark Eidelstein and Yura Borisov, brings out the underlying sorrow simmering just beneath the humor layering the surface.
When we first meet Ani (short for Anora), exotic dancing and sex work are simply facts of her life. She knows how to hustle and does it well, navigating conversations into sales or leading customers to private rooms or the ATM. Whether she enjoys it is irrelevant—what matters is her ability to navigate any situation with the coolness of an alley cat.
But this story also holds hints of the Cinderella narrative. Ani’s “prince charming” appears as Ivan (Eidelstein), the 21-year-old prodigal son of a Russian oligarch who asks for a girl who can speak Russian. After her lunch break, Ani and her plain Russian find comfort on Ivan’s lap and his eagerness to spend money. Enticed by the American dream Ani represents, Ivan becomes a generous high-roller who favors Ani’s company, eventually asking if he could be her only client. Ani goes along for the ride—it’s not every day a young client offers everything she asks for, often teasing her that she could always ask for more. Despite Ivan’s aloofness and evident disinterest in the world beyond his own, Ani agrees to marry him during a spontaneous trip to Vegas, reeled in by the promise of a better life than the one she’s known. Who needs engaging conversation when you can wrap yourself in luxurious Russian sable fur?
However, the honeymoon is short-lived. When Ivan’s family learns of his marriage to an escort, they turn to Toros (Karren Karagulian), a local priest managing the family’s affairs in America. Toros enlists two Armenians—Garnick (Vache Tovmasyan) and Igor (Borisov)—to “handle” the situation. The Armenians scramble to keep up as Ani shows she is all bite and no bark, while Ivan fails to stand up to his glorified babysitters. Only Igor, a quiet man with a commanding presence, can keep pace with Ani, slinking in step behind her and only appearing to take up space when necessary.
Ani soon realizes her husband is a spineless child, eager for one last hurrah—with or without her. Unfortunately, he chooses the latter, leaving Ani with the goons for a cat-and-mouse chase through Brighton Beach.
Though Ani is largely pulled from focus in the second act, Madison’s performance gives her character a level of depth that draws the audience toward her, even as the rom-com morphs into a screwball comedy centered on the goons. It is a structural problem noticeable in the first act as Ivan’s world consumes Ani, relegating her to one of the several side characters in Ivan’s American life.
However, Baker regains the narrative’s emotional focus when Ivan belittles Ani for her social standing, highlighting his ongoing exploration of class and the American dream. The scene hits hardest here as Ivan—a man-child chasing the impossible—shatters Ani’s aspirations. One could view it as the hustler getting hustled, but that interpretation oversimplifies the story’s nuanced themes.
Instead, Anora invites us to empathize with characters often pushed to the periphery, despite their hopes for upward mobility. When they’re knocked down, there’s always someone to catch them, hold them, and assure them things will be different next time.
The vulnerability in Anora is striking. When the lights dim, the flashy costumes are tucked away, and the cold, snow-gray mornings return, what endures is the humanity of people reaching out, reminding each other that they are more than society’s perceptions.
‘Anora’ (2024)
Anora is timeless, establishing itself within the “eat-the-rich” genre that has recently captivated cinema. Yet unlike films suggesting everyone aspires to wealth at any cost, Anora quietly reminds us that progress lies in recognizing our shared humanity. Baker isn’t making a bold statement or staging class warfare; he’s showing something deeply human beneath the layers of laughter and sorrow.
Even after the gut-punch ending that leaves you motionless, afraid to break the spell, Anora lingers, enriching cinema in a way only Baker can. As Greta Gerwig, who served as the Jury President at Cannes, said of the film, “It did something truthful and unexpected.”
If this is the direction of American cinema, we should embrace it, giving it the attention and praise it deserves to inspire small yet significant stories worthy of the big screen.
Grade: A
