A still from 'Anora'.

A lot of the splendour in Sean Baker’s Anora lies in its treatment – where we might be shown one thing, but deliberately made to feel something else. For example, the film opens with a discomfiting panning shot featuring barely-clothed exotic dancers performing with neon lights around them. However, Baker scores this scene with a loud, winsome techno song taking what is a distressing visual of young women forced to work a job that fetishises them, and drains the self-pity out of it. It is what it is; these women aren’t victims, and Baker seems to be insisting we mustn’t see them with a patronising gaze, demoting them from a person to a social cause. They probably do need saving, but they have no delusions about expecting it from a drunk, seemingly kind spectator. They’ve probably heard too many 3 a. m. promises, which have been forgotten by 6 a.m. These hardened individuals hide their disappointments behind their profane, tough exterior. Ani (Mikey Madison) is no different.

In a sublime opening stretch, Baker (with indie films like Tangerine and Florida Project behind him) establishes Ani’s work day at her high-end Manhattan strip club. Her simple objective is to make the mostly male patrons spend as much money as they can, even if it includes detours to a nearby ATM. It starts off with some cute, flirty conversation to ease the patron in, and then somewhere along the way comes a suggestion for a private show. The action moves indoors, only for the spending and the bad decisions to quadruple. Baker is able to find a rhythm in Ani’s routine: in the way she dances, teases her clients, does what she’s expected to, and goes home when the night is over.

Her life’s course is disrupted when young ‘high-roller’ Ivan Zakharov (Mark Eydelshteyn) – son of a billionaire oligarch from Russia – walks through the doors. Ani is the only dancer who speaks Russian, so she’s given the task of tending to him. When the conversation starts off with his broken English and her cautious, filled-with-pauses Russian, the audience members have little to no clue that they’re watching the meet-cute of a ‘love story’. Ivan asks Ani to share her phone number with him, and before you know it, we’re watching Pretty Woman all over again. 

Baker knows this and takes our expectations to dizzying heights, giving us the perfect fairytale. Ivan’s debauchery continues in Vegas with Ani by his side, where the visual language of the film (by cinematographer Drew Daniels and the editor, Baker himself) races at a million miles per hour. In what seems like a frivolous suggestion at first, Ivan proposes to Ani. The audience I was with, brushed it off even before Ani did. But Eydelshteyn employs his sincere, dead-serious eyes. Could this be Ani’s way out? Is this real love, or is it just fantasy? Like Ani, we too have a bad feeling. And yet, we’re seduced by the less pragmatic, more attractive questions — what if this is real? What if this romance actually pans out? What if it’s Ani’s way out of dingy, suffocating strip clubs to a lifetime of well-lit, dignified rooms? What if?

A still from ‘Anora’.

One of the most enrapturing things about Anora, is how Baker balances the aftermath of the Vegas wedding, straddling genres of a Coenesque screwball comedy, a road movie, a social satire, and a feel-good film. As the news of Ivan and Ani’s wedding gets out on social media, his parents send his Godfather and local guardian, Toros (Karren Karagulian) to ‘fix’ matters. It’s Toros’s job to get the marriage annulled within the next 24 hours, before his parents (already airborne from Russia) touch down in America. Toros sends his two henchmen – Garnick (Vache Tovmasyan) and Igor (Yura Borisov) to check on the extent of the damage, which results in one of the most singularly unclassifiable sequences in a recent film. Ivan manages to evade both the men, while Ani uses her physicality and her raised-in-New York smart mouth to hurt the duo.

In Anora, which it’s later revealed is Ani’s legal full-name, Baker keeps the jokes coming thick and fast, even when it mimics a stressful Safdie brothers movie – after Ivan goes missing. The men have to find him before his parents land and raise hell, while Ani needs to find him to secure her fast-depleting shot at the good life. In one of my favourite jokes, a hapless Toros going around with Ivan’s picture inside a diner is shooed away by a group of young men. Toros’s miserable pleas quickly turn to a diatribe about how he dislikes the current generation, their innate discourteousness, and their sense of entitlement; Toros sounds eerily similar to a middle-aged Indian man at a social gathering.

A still from ‘Anora’.

As Ani, Mikey Madison, is such an electric presence in every scene that it’s hard to look away from her. She conveys her character’s steeliness, vulnerabilities, desperation with economy. Eydelshteyn manages to make a careless young man seem silly, charming and even likeable. Ivan views himself as more rebellious than he is, but his cruel recklessness is also believable. He will tease a girl’s dreams, only to snuff it out for it to end up as a ‘funny’ anecdote for him in a few years’ time. As Toros and Garnick – Karagulian and Tovmasyan are mostly required to play two bumbling punchline characters, but the actors sell the hell out of their silliness. The surprise package in the film is Borisov as Igor – the silent bald stoic Russian, who can be as dangerous as he looks. But Baker bestows him with moments of grace, as a way of saying that even the most stereotypically-dressed people are capable of acting in the most surprising ways.

Baker brings this rollercoaster of a film to a slow, gradually-decelerating halt. The last scene unveils the heartbreak this film has been hiding under its bright, flashy, humorous armour. It’s an exhibition of a filmmaker in such tremendous control that he played the entire theatre like a live orchestra for over two hours, drawing out the laughs, the winces, the gasps – only to conclude the film in utter silence. He might have batted for outcasts in his earlier films as well, but Sean Baker has never shone brighter than now. 

*Anora won the Palme d’Or at the 2024 Cannes film festival; it had its South Asia premiere as the closing film of the MAMI Mumbai film festival 2024.