After Midnight — Anora
Yeah, I know I’m way behind on this one. That’s the nature of the beast during Festival Season. I’ve got quite the backlog to get through, but I promise I’ll catch up in time.
Anyway, the eighth feature from writer/director Sean Baker (The Florida Project, which I despised, and Red Rocket, which I loved), and yet another sympathetic but still somewhat realistic fable about sex workers, Anora has won over critics and audiences all over the world, becoming the first American film since The Tree of Life to win the Palm d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, and in the minds of many, it’s the early front-runner for next year’s Best Picture Oscar. Should it win, it would be only the third ever to claim both prestigious honors, the others being 1955’s Marty and 2019’s Parasite. I’m pretty sure you can pencil it in for a slew of Independent Spirit Awards as well.
So, a month after its release, the question stands. Is this movie indeed all that, and the proverbial bag of chips? Honestly, for the most part, yes. Anora has its flaws like any other, mostly the underwhelming supporting cast and a lack of plot motivation, but where it really counts — as in the overall storyline and the lead performance — Baker absolutely nails it, creating a piece of high art that you could easily dismiss as a pretentious student film project if you just heard the premise by itself.
Mikey Madison, known for her roles in Better Things and the Scream reboot, plays our titular protagonist, who prefers to go by “Ani.” She works as a stripper at a club in Manhattan (called “Headquarters” in the film; it was shot at the real HQ-KONY in New York). Like most of Baker’s catalog to date, the early part of the flick is spent showing the day-to-day normalcy of Ani’s life. She dances, she flirts for tips, she shoots the shit with her bestie coworker (Luna Sofia) during breaks, and has something of a rivalry with another stripper who calls herself Diamond (Lindsey Normington, an actress and real-life dancer who has made waves in labor organization for strippers). One night, she’s pulled aside by her boss to work a VIP table with Russian customers, as she’s the only one in the club who understands the language. Here she meets Ivan, or “Vanya,” (Mark Eydelshteyn), the young son of an oligarch (Aleksei Serebryakov), living it up and enjoying all the hedonistic fun he can before he has to return home and train to take over the family business.
Vanya is instantly taken by Ani’s beauty and humor, so naturally he pays her for a private visit at his mansion and the full-on sex he can’t get at the club. This becomes a regular arrangement for them, with Ani more enjoying the money than the intercourse, until Vanya makes an odd request. He would like Ani to pretend to be his girlfriend for a week so that they can party with his friends. The massive haze of drugs, booze, and sex eventually leads Vanya to actually propose to Ani, as a “Green Card Marriage” will allow him to stay in the U.S. indefinitely. She agrees, though not without a demand for a huge ring, and the two are married in Las Vegas.
This news infuriates Vanya’s parents, who demand an annulment and charter an emergency flight to New York to pick up their son. In the meantime, they dispatch an Armenian vicar named Toros (Karren Karagulian) to keep Vanya in place until they arrive. Toros sends two enforcers, his brother Garnick (Vache Tovmasyan) and the along-for-the-ride Igor (Yura Borisov) to the mansion, only for Vanya to scarper at the first sign of trouble, leaving Ani behind to fend for herself. After a lengthy struggle, Ani agrees to help them search the city for Vanya, but not so they can cancel the marriage. Instead, she wants to prove that despite the haste, what they have is real.
In what is certain to catapult her into superstardom, Madison gives what is easily one of the best performances of the year, playing Ani as a character who takes nothing for granted, but who still believes in a fantasy ideal of a better life. For the entire courtship with Vanya, everything is transactional, from negotiating the price to be his “girlfriend” to the mandated engagement ring. But as things go, you do get the hints that there is a growing affection for the young idiot showering her with money and gifts. Early on in their tryst, after they’ve done the deed, Vanya shakes himself off and starts playing video games. After a bit of talk, Ani reminds him that he paid for a full hour, and that there’s still time to go again if he wants, and it’s weirdly endearing to see him leap back into action with aplomb. As things wear on, Ani takes a bit of a lead, showing him techniques that make their time together even more pleasurable, especially for herself. You can see the sparks of something authentic starting to formulate, to the point where Ani is genuinely willing to believe this impossibility can be her reality.
In that respect, the film is presented like a very erotic Cinderella story. Everything leading up to the Vegas wedding is similar to the quickie courtship of that fairy tale, and while there aren’t any wicked stepmothers or stepsisters (unless you count Diamond, but she barely registers), there is that dream of upward social mobility that is almost nonexistent for those on the bottom rung, and strippers are certainly stigmatized into that caste regardless of how much money they make. The arrival of Toros and his goons represents the stroke of midnight, and the end of the ball. The harsh inequities of life bring Ani crashing back to Earth and then some, and we’re left wondering if there’s any actual chance of Vanya being her prince, or if he’s just another fuckboy. This leaves us in a position I don’t think many viewers would have expected going in, one where we’re legitimately rooting for a happy ending despite our own sense of logic, and questioning Alfred Lord Tennyson’s classic line of whether it is indeed better to have loved (or in this case, tasted contentment) and lost than to have never loved at all.
At the same time, Baker does spare a thought for the others caught in the middle of all this. In the end, everyone attached to Vanya and his family are getting the short end. The wealthy Russians can buy and sell them (or even have them killed) with a thought, and no matter what they do or who they hurt, they will never see any consequences for the chaos their excess leaves in its wake. The only real catharsis is a great moment late in the film where Ani gets one over on Vanya’s witch of a mother (Darya Ekamasova) that even makes the father laugh.
There’s a particular bit of empathy for Igor, as he kind of serves as an unrequested mirror for Ani. He first meets her at Vanya’s mansion, where he and Garnick are put through some comical paces to restrain her. This is the best scene of the movie, one of the best of the year even, and Baker films and edits it immaculately. He’s come a long way from when he shot Tangerine on a few smartphones. Anyway, once the dust settles on the mild domestic carnage, we see that Igor is, in general, an alright guy. Yes, he’s in a shit situation where he’s basically an enforcer for a man who just barely stays on the legal side of “mobster,” but like Ani, he simply does what he must to survive, makes ends meet as best he can, has some lived experience that has granted him a small degree of wisdom, and outside the parameters of his job, he tries to help others, including being the closest thing to a gentleman that Ani encounters throughout this entire escapade, including Vanya. He actually cares about people and feels bad about what Ani’s going through, because even though he doesn’t know her — and in fairness, neither do we, really, which is sort of the point — he knows she doesn’t deserve this kind of shabby treatment. This is a guy who works a shitty job because he must, has to constantly maintain his own balance when it comes to ethical behavior, and even though he’s in the employ of a billionaire who should reward his loyalty, he’ll spend the rest of his days tooling around in his grandmother’s car and never even get the brief dalliance with the upper crust that Ani gets. That he’s seen as the bad option, an eventuality that reduces Ani to tears, is arguably just as much of a tragedy as what Ani herself endures.
As I said, there are some minor flaws that stop this from being an instant Best Picture favorite in my book. Apart from Madison, and to a lesser extent Borisov, the cast isn’t very strong. This was clearly designed as a star-making vehicle for Madison, and that’s fine. It’s not a Best Actress Showcase like so many other films that come out around this time of year, but it’s plain to see that Baker constructed this as a solo adventure, with everyone else flitting in and out on the periphery. The second is that, as I just mentioned, we really don’t know anything about Ani as a person. We know her through her vocation, and we build up a connection due to our own innate wish for improved social standing. But unlike the fairy tale upon which this story appears to be based, we never really learn much about her personality. Until we hit that metaphorical midnight, we really only root for her because she’s the main character, and because Madison’s performance is so on point. In a lot of thematic and spiritual siblings, we’re presented with something akin to a meritocratic argument as to why someone should be lifted out of their particular doldrums. Here we’re not given that, and thus must rely entirely on the power of the character to make us care. We do get there, thankfully, but it does take a while, and if Madison wasn’t selling every moment of it, we might not have.
On the whole, I can see why this is a critical darling. It’s bold, sexy, and unapologetic, just like its lead. There are some really well choreographed scenes, the dialogue (when it’s not just mid-coitus groans and cursing) is more clever than I would have anticipated, and Mikey Madison is almost certain to hear her name called when Oscar nominations come out in January. This is a risky fractured modern fable that could have fallen apart at any number of places, but Sean Baker was able to thread the needle and turn something that could easily be dismissed as “Stripper bangs rich kid, then he leaves” into a surprising and heartfelt think piece far more cerebral than any of its characters could be.
Grade: A-
Join the conversation in the comments below! What film should I review next? Are you already penciling this in on your Academy ballot? Do you ever wonder who must have hurt Sean Baker for him to make all these movies about sex workers? Let me know! And remember, you can follow me on Twitter (fuck “X”) and subscribe to my YouTube channel for even more content, and check out the entire BTRP Media Network at btrpmedia.com!
Originally published at http://actuallypaid.com on November 26, 2024.
