Seduced and abandoned: "Anora"

It's not just that they marry in haste and repent at leisure, they even fuck in haste and repent at leisure. One reason early responders have hailed Sean Baker's Anora as a new American classic is surely that it suggests Pretty Woman if it had picked up where The Graduate left off: with two young lovers, bonded as much by cold, hard currency as by sincere affection, wondering what the future holds for them - or, really, if there's any future in their coupling at all. Another reason would be that Baker, as shown by his earlier films, appears to understand a fair bit about the way the world turns for those on its lower rungs. He knows instinctively why a young lapdancer (Mikey Madison), possessed of a certain streetwise intelligence to sit alongside her youthful naivety, might seek to trade in her drab walk-up, stuck with train-track backdrop and pass-agg roomie, for a new life in a Brighton Beach palace with a moptopped oligarch's son (Mark Eydelshteyn), possessed of riches enough to sit playing videogames all day. Yet Baker sees how insecure this world still is, how even installing yourself in a split-level dream house and allowing a boyish swain to throw a fifteen-second hump into you every now and again is no guarantee of the good life. Within this domestic arrangement, the writer-director spies how the lifestyle of the idle rich demands a coterie of hired help to pick up the slack, and hatchet-faced puppetmasters to pick up the tab. But Baker also enters the following into mitigation: that a pair of goofball kids, too young really to know what they're leaping heedlessly into, are as deserving of happiness as anyone in this messed-up, back-to-front, God-forsaken universe.

Two truths quickly become apparent watching Anora. One is that, when he's operating at his very best, Baker makes the business of storytelling - setting out some idea of a world, and then moving the characters and us through it - seem as easy and as fresh as pie. The other is that, again when he's operating at his very best, Baker might be making just about the most likable films in the world right now. The movement, in this instance, is upward mobility. From the shuttered darkness of a stripjoint's backroom, we are transported - via private jet - to the high-flying dazzle of casinos, pool parties and Presidential suites; Baker knows that, like Anora herself, we have to be seduced as well as elevated. This is trickier than you might think, given that everything we see here is being bought and paid for (and with dirty money), all a matter of negotiation, economics and power dynamics. It is doubly tricky, given these kids' frankly terrible taste in music - one early indicator of questionable judgement - although Baker is nothing if not upfront about this, choosing to open the movie with a dance remix of Take That's "Greatest Day". (A lot of bad habits are picked up in stripjoints.) 

As he's done elsewhere, Baker affords his performers uncommon space to inhabit their characters: to make their choices and mistakes, to talk and act in ways we rarely see folks in modern movies talking and acting. Those of us who've grown up watching Madison as one of Pamela Adlon's offspring in TV's blessed Better Things may have to cover our eyes during the stripping and sex scenes - it feels like watching a friend's daughter on the pole - but as a transition into more adult parts, the character of Anora has it all: here is a character who comes to transcend her girlish form, whether by running her mouth in a way that suggests American movies internalising the cultural influence of Cardi B, or by embodying some deeply 2024 anxieties around control and regulation of the female body. (It's all pleasure and profit until the patriarchs show up.) Eydelshteyn has, if anything, an even tougher assignment, to get us to care about a moneyed, coke-snorting stripling with a thick Borat accent - and he succeeds, up until a rather feckless and arbitrary-seeming twist of characterisation in the film's second half. We warm to these kids' spirit, the fact they haven't had the life completely knocked out of them; we sense they'd make a good match for one another if everybody else could just quit their interfering. I did also begin to wonder, though, whether they have quite enough life in them to justify the film's 131-minute running time.

We've seen enough of Baker's work now to suss out potential strengths and weaknesses. In 2017's The Florida Project - still this director's best film, not least for seeming so unlikely an occurrence at that point in the history of the American cinema - this filmmaker demonstrated an ability to toggle between perspectives, including those of a small child and a grizzled hotel manager, and to make those viewpoints convincing and affecting in their turn. Tonally and formally broader than its predecessor, Anora only begins to stutter upon the introduction, in an unusually protracted scene around the midpoint, of Russian-Armenian heavies who present as far less organised than their equivalents might be in reality. That Madison's Anora is already fluent in their mother tongue feels like one more act of kindliness on Baker's part, but also too convenient, too much the screenwriter's conceit: it further neutralises the threat that the mobsters pose, and allows our heroine to outthink and outspeak them to some degree amid the chicanery that follows. Baker would doubtless argue that the running time is in itself an act of generosity - offering his players more space, and us more bang for our buck - but it also allows lassitude to creep into shot. The second half, which drags these characters kicking and screaming around the houses, is in effect a ninety-minute rerun of Tangerine's closing stretch: what was so exhilarating and enthralling there soon becomes exhausting here. There's too much space, and the characters don't develop satisfactorily beyond a certain point; the Russian kid flees for no good reason, everybody else goes round and round shrieking at one another, and the initial pleasure gives way to a pain that begins to feel punitive. I wonder whether this is just reflective of where the movies are at these days: so few comedies are getting made that the ones that do get greenlit feel obliged to bulk themselves out into big, festival-ready, awards-primed events. Baker grants Anora more life, more characters, more movement, more local colour, more T&A - all those things missing from most movies nowadays - and that's certainly worth celebrating. But he also allows the film too much leisure for its own good, finally; we, too, find ourselves with time enough to start repenting.

Anora is now playing in cinemas nationwide.