‘Anora’ is a Truly Special Film

From the first image of Anora, director Sean Baker establishes his approach to human relations. Even as bodies writhe in a pan across a row of lap dancers, we zoom into the face of the title character, a dancer herself, as credits spin to a background of blurred sparks and a highly romantic track. There’s no clue to impoverished necessity in her eyes, nor does it ever reveal itself; she’s happy to be the nymph, and Baker understands. Throughout the film, bodies remain afterthoughts, the feelings they and their morning-after wake might engender on display in the visage, first dopey then fraught. It sounds like a simple, conservative reminder of proper sexual politics, but there’s nothing cheap about it when the people living it are this real. 

In this Hollywood landscape of mid, overhyped studio golden boys like Ari Aster and Robert Eggers and corporate credibility-mercenary hires like Barry Jenkins’ faux-live action Lion King prequel, it’s tough to imagine a smoother, more deserved upwards career trajectory than newly minted Palme D’or winner Sean Baker’s.

After breaking out of Sundance with the thoroughly authentic Tangerine, Baker established a neo-neo realism beyond the many attempts film culture had long been trying to forcibly anoint. The Florida Project continued his focus on marginal sex work present in everything he’s done since 2012’s original indie calling card Starlet, including Anora, and garnered more accolades than Tangerine. Indeed, it was equally excellent. A Covid-stunted film market blunted his Cannes debut Red Rocket’s launch, but it remained one of the more notable arthouse films of that era, priming him for a return. It may appear still a premature coronation, but it likely won’t after seeing this latest effort.

Anora is a departure. While none of his “night butterflies” feel any shame of their avenue to fulfill the obligation of living, Anora is just a young girl living the life modern young girls so carelessly live, that of unabashed self exploitation. Not only that, she’s rather big time; a much more glamorous escort than the freshly paroled Tangerines or The Florida Project’s hotel dwellers. Her naivete neeedn’t be anything so grave, until it must. Baker has a magnanimous perspective on this. He joins in the fun; the first act’s debauched whirlwind is a blast even as we wait for the other shoe to drop. There’s undeniable romance in it all, and when Anora Vegas-weds Vanya, the Russian oligarch’s heir parading her around, we can feel it there. Hell, this kind of excess is nearly distilled romance.

The dedication of the rest of the film to processing Anora’s realization that in the eyes of her boy toy’s system she represents the inconvenience and pettiness of vice itself is rightly devastating. But there’s really no time for it; Baker fashions a Three Stooges routine with the Russian goons, tasked with locating the prodigal son Vanya. It’s so warm and humanly enriching of such a darkly-stereotyped group that the fact that their entire quest is to legally discard Anora doesn’t diminish any empathy. They, like her, are mostly just doing a job, bumbling into a new reason for their boss to kill them every few minutes. The quiet Igor, by chance in the most, frame-bound physical proximity to Anora throughout the ordeal, breaks out as a character even more emblematic of the film than its namesake.

What makes Anora a special work starts at this tragicomic tonal juxtapositon, but its affect is profound enough to win out on its own. It’s highly reminiscent of the Safdie Brothers’s blitzes through the city, clinging for dear life, but it’s kinder, and with more feminine dignity and worth than masculine life and limb at stake. Actually it’s more like the Safdies’ best film, Heaven Knows What, in that it runs on heartbreak and detours for laughs often.

The way Baker gets inside people in the middle of crisis or brouhaha is what seals it; Anora always finds a way to assert herself no matter how little her situation is telling her, directly, that she is worth. But in a startlingly somber climax following what could be easily described as a romp of hijinks and banter, the hit that Anora takes becomes fully palpable. And yet, in Igor, there’s comfort by her side, in the form of another so diminished. Baker’s work is for anyone who has ever felt small, but doesn’t lie even with cinematic exultation about one’s true size. It just tells you you’re at least bigger than you think you are.