Anora

 

A Choice Between Two Indefinite Articles

Anora
USA 2024
Directed by Sean Baker
Universal

I’ve been wanting to see Anora since the end of last year. Alas, it played for one week in limited showings at my local cinema and trying to get to somewhere else to see it during the pre-Christmas rush proved impossible for me. But I knew enough from the advertising that it might well have been one of my favourite films last year, enough to give it a mention in my intro to my New Year’s Day list. And the reason for that is, primarily, because I really trust writer/director Sean Baker... even though I’ve not seen any of his prior films (a couple of them deal with subject matter I’m not comfortable with... my problem specific to me).

So why trust Sean Baker so much... and did the film live up to my expectations?

Well, back when we were in lockdown during the pandemic, I was watching a lot of those brilliant Criterion Closet videos to pass the time after work and one of them was Sean Baker and I liked his style. But the clincher was when, as America was just locking down, he flew up to the Severin Films HQ and recorded their equivalent version of the CC, the Severin Cellar. At the time, I think he was the first person to do both the Criterion and Severin movie grabs (I think there’s been one other guy since). And in the Severin one he not only did me a solid by forewarning me ( to allow me to save some cash a couple of years in advance) that Severin were working on their big Black Emanuelle box set (reviews coming to this blog at some point) but, honestly, you could see how much the guy loved film in any kind of genre and budget (as it should be) and I just have a huge amount of respect for him (not sure about his singing voice but I’ll get back to that). These can be found on YouTube here and here.

Two other things which endear me to him and this film in particular is that... firstly, the Blu Ray release in a month or two is bypassing the main distributor and going straight to Criterion... the first time a film has done that in a long while, I think. Even the great Wes Anderson generally has to go through a distributor version first before ending up with the definitive edition on Criterion. Secondly... man, the cover of the Blu Ray they are putting out is a wonderful nod to a shot of the late, great Soledad Miranda for one of her poster shots for Jess Franco’s Vampyros Lesbos (reviewed here) so, well, you’ve got to love this guy.

So, yeah, Anora.

Mikey Madison (who I hated as one of Manson’s psychopaths in Once Upon A Time In Hollywood... which means she did her job well) plays the terminally cute sex worker Ani (which she prefers over her real name Anora), who works in a strip club and, because she can speak Russian, gets hooked up with a young client, Ivan, played by Mark Eydelshteyn, who is the son of a ‘beyond rich’ Russian family who are amazingly famous for reasons we, the audience, never find out. And, after an extended ‘escort vacation’ the two get hitched in Las Vegas, marrying Anora into Ivan's family. Which doesn’t go down well with said family who send some heavies in to make the two annul the marriage pronto but, Ivan does a runner and then Anora has to work with these goons to find Ivan, primarily because she wants to stay married.

And it’s brilliant, as is one of the heavies, Igor, played by Yura Borisov, who had my sympathies right from the start because of Anora’s ‘fighting for survival’ abuse of his character... which is feeding into the wonderful conclusion to the film. Which I won’t spoil but I will touch upon in a little while.

Firstly, the film is shot wonderfully with a rich colour palette leaning into reds and blues which, honestly, just looks like eye candy all the way through. There’s lots of nudity, of course, and the film starts strongly in the strip club in which Anora works, panning down a column of lap-dancers giving shows before getting to Anora and her dance... and with the credits superimposed against her brightly lit face and body, I can’t help but think that Baker intended this sequence to be exactly as I interpreted it. Which is as a kind of ‘live and unplugged’ variant of a James Bond opening title sequence. It looks fantastic and puts us into a kind of ‘adult fantasy’ environment straight away.

So the cinematography is wonderful and... so is the editing, actually (which, again, I think was also handled by Sean Baker). Madison’s performance is absolutely blisteringly funny at some points of this frenetic movie and the comedy of the extended ‘home invasion’ sequence has some high comedy where the heavies just don’t know what to do with a kicking, biting, screaming, abusive Anora so they can calculate their best move. And that editing and timing really come into their own here, as Baker sets up a shot where the camera is just trained on Madison’s mouth while the audience are waiting to see if she starts screaming the house down again. This is a marvellous example, I would say, of the art of cinema where the performance and the editing are absolutely in synch with each other... so if nothing else, Baker is an incredible director. And the lead actress really is a force of nature.

Now the film has no musical score but it does have a heck of a lot of needle drop songs in it. Normally this would be a huge turn off for me but... even though I really didn’t think much of the majority of the songs... they fit the milieu of the characters nicely and, yeah, they didn’t frighten me away. Which is another good sign for this movie as far as I’m concerned.

What it also has is a magnificent ending between Anora and Igor which, is hard to pin down as a definitive conclusion but which acts, finally, as an emotional release for the central character. It’s a wonderful, almost ambiguous ending which, in my mind, pushes further the kind of 1970s, stylistic aesthetic which I feel the movie is kind of soaked in. It’s an ending which feels like its very important, while at the same time being completely open to interpretation as it seems to pitch different, almost contrasting emotional states and slip them into a blender together... good stuff.

And I think that’s me done, more or less, on Anora (which I shall be purchasing on Blu Ray as soon as Criterion get it out over here). It’s a hard recommendation from me and, frankly, it may well have pipped Hundreds Of Beavers (reviewed here) to the 2024 top spot if I’d seen it last year. And I’m glad to say the critical and audience response to this one has been ‘through the roof’ too. It is, I would say, very much a masterpiece of a movie and I can’t help but think that both director and stars alike are left feeling, in the singing voice of Baker in the Severin Cellar when talking about Emanuelle And The Last Cannibals (review coming to this blog at some point in the nearish future)... “so happy, like a clown.”