ANORA
FOUR STARS A sex worker scores big when she marries the son of a Russian oligarch. Mum and Dad are not happy.
DRAMA COMEDY US English #ANORA
Starring Mikey Madison, Mark Eydelshteyn
Ani is a 23-year-old ‘exotic dancer’ in a seedy corner of Brooklyn who gets by, but is about to get by a whole lot better when she meets Ivan, the hard-partying son of an oligarch. Ani speaks a little Russian, Ivan speaks very little English and so he books her to be his date for the rest of his holiday in the US. He gets sex on tap, she enjoys the benefits of his absurd wealth. On a whim they go to Vegas and like so many before them, Ani and Ivan get married.
Writer/director Sean Baker is something of a unique thinker and filmmaker. He also knows how to plunder cinema’s greatest hits yet make something identifiably his own. Thus ANORA, a riff on Cinderella with drugs, sex and EDM as put through the lens of 70s realism. It’s fantastic.
Hearing the news, Ivan’s parents send in the handlers while they make their way from Moscow to collect their son. You’d think dispatching Ani and readying Ivan for the trip home would be a simple enough task. But these men hadn’t reckoned on the girl’s determination to rescue her husband whom she knows loves her. At least, that’s how it starts.
What unfolds is a supercharged string of events that throws romance, comedy, drama and enough coke, booze, sex and gangsters to make Scorsese blush into a blender then goes on to critique class divide and the tarnished American dream. Scathingly, I might add. At over two relentless, action-packed hours the film asks a lot of its audience but the rewards for those who stay the course are plentiful.
Mikey Madison’s Ani is a creature to behold: charismatic, complex, repellant, frightening yet oddly sweet, charming and resilient. Smart too, when her vision’s not clouded by possibilities, romantic or otherwise. Madison pulls out all the stops to set this human hurricane loose as she blasts across the screen, upending everything in her wake including, with devastating humour, the gangsters sent to subdue her.
Granted you need an appetite for the frenetic and a tolerance for contemporary values and behaviours that polite society was not modelled upon. Thus ANORA is not for everyone - it’s long, it’s profane, it’s provocative. It’s the kind of film that polarises audiences and critics alike. It’s festival click-bait recognised by President Greta BARBIE Gerwig’s Cannes Film Festival (it collected the Palme d’Or). It’s also one of the best films of the year.
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