Sean Baker (2024)
It was a coincidence – and, to me, a surprise – that I saw two screwball comedies in succession at this year’s London Film Festival: I hadn’t realised that Anora, winner of the Cannes Palme d’Or, is widely regarded as a ‘contemporary return to screwball tradition’ (Justin Chang). There’s nevertheless some distance between George Stevens’ The Talk of the Town and Sean Baker’s latest – eighty-two years, for a start. Much more happens in the Stevens film yet writer-director Baker’s goes on a lot longer. And Anora – whose title character is a young sex worker – puts the screw into screwball.
The film’s first hour mostly comprises scenes in Headquarters, a Manhattan strip club, and a bedroom in the Brooklyn mansion of a Russian oligarch. Anora (Mikey Madison), who prefers to be called Ani, works at the club. After she and the other girl table dancers have done their routines on stage, they escort the men who’ve watched them to backstage cubicles for further entertainment. One of these male punters, and an unusually young one, is Ivan, aka Vanya (Mark Eydelshteyn), son of fabulously wealthy Nikolai Zakharov. Vanya is meant to be studying in New York but spends his time partying and playing video games. His English is limited: Ani, who has Russian ancestry and can speak the language, is the obvious partner for him when he visits Headquarters. He enjoys her company so much that he hires her for sex sessions at his father’s home then offers her $15,000 to stay with him for a week. During that time, Vanya heads for Las Vegas, where he asks Ani to marry him. He insists that he loves her. They tie the knot in a Vegas wedding chapel.
The set-up evokes, rather than vintage screwball, two other films of more recent but still distant decades – one a musical, Sweet Charity (1969), the other a romcom, Pretty Woman (1990). Unlike Charity Hope Valentine, a taxi dancer in the Fandango Ballroom, who’s looking for love and incurably romantic, Ani is candidly materialistic. Even so, she wants more than her work in the strip club gives her, which brings to mind one of Sweet Charity‘s best numbers, ‘There’s Gotta Be Something Better Than This’. Unexpected wedding bells are also a big part of Sweet Charity. As for Pretty Woman, Ani’s seven-day arrangement with Vanya clearly echoes the arrangement between Julia Roberts’ Vivian, a Hollywood escort, and Richard Gere’s wealthy businessman who hires her for a week, which results in a whirlwind romance. The resemblances between these movies and Anora don’t go much further, though. Vanya’s ulterior motive in marrying Ani emerges when he mentions obtaining a green card so that he can stay in the US rather than return to Russia and work for his father. Once his parents find out about the marriage, their inept henchmen in America, whose job it is to keep an eye on Vanya, are instructed to apprehend the newlyweds and arrange an annulment. That process, which accounts for nearly the whole of the rest of Baker’s film, involves a lengthy physical fight between Anora and her captors, and torrents of four-letter words (seven-letter words when the adjective’s used). Mary Whitehouse et al, who notoriously used to count the bloodys in Till Death Us Do Part, could never have kept up with this onslaught.
The arrival of Vanya’s godfather, Toros (Karren Karagulian, who worked with Baker on Tangerine (2015)), and his sidekicks at the Zakharovs’ Brooklyn home marks a violent change also in the film’s visual rhythm. Until then, the camerawork (Drew Daniels) and editing (Sean Baker himself) are relentlessly jumpy – there are very many short scenes. Once Vanya has absconded from his father’s mansion and Ani is being held there against her will, the action shifts into real time – with characters, chiefly Ani and Toros, yelling at each other over and over again. Toros is not only Vanya’s godfather but an Orthodox priest; he’s conducting a baptism in his church when he gets the bad-news phone call from Vanya’s domineering mother. He has to excuse himself and changes quickly out of vestments into civvies. This gag went down a storm with plenty of the Royal Festival Hall audience though once Baker’s done the gag, he forgets about the character’s priestly side. (I don’t know if he’s making a particular point about complicity between Russian oligarchs and the Orthodox Church – or just lampooning pious hypocrites, a comedy staple.). Ani, Toros and his cronies – Garnick (Vache Tovmasyan) and Igor (Yura Borisov) – tour Brooklyn looking for Vanya and eventually track him down in Headquarters, his last stop on a bender. Nikolai Zakharov (Aleksei Serebryakov) and his fearsome wife, Galina (Darya Ekamasova), then arrive from Russia in their private jet for a climactic showdown.
Ami keeps hoping throughout this that Vanya truly loves her; she’s crushed when he tells her not to be stupid and that, of course, now that his parents are on the case, the marriage will be annulled. Sean Baker’s snap conversion of his heroine to victim was one of my main problems with the film. Ani is nobody’s fool during Vanya’s ‘courtship’ – she’s incredulous, then sceptical, when he proposes marriage. Baker never even implies that Vanya’s in love with Ani – he just loves having sex with her. And although they laugh plenty together in the bedroom, there’s not much to suggest she wants anything from him except his money. It’s understandable, in order to give the film some emotional substance in its second half, that Ani gets her heart broken – but it’s not convincing. Mikey Madison is remarkable, though. She had a small part (as one of the Manson Family) in Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood (2019); her only lead role before this one, as far as I can tell, was in a 2017 drama, directed by Terry Sanders, called Liza, Liza, Skies Are Grey. Yet Baker knew Madison well enough to write the title role in Anora for her / and asks a lot of her, not least in the sex scenes. According to their press conference at Cannes, Madison turned down the offer of an intimacy coordinator because she’d ‘already created a really comfortable relationship’ with Baker and his wife, Samantha Quan, who produced the film with him: the couple, says Wikipedia, ‘would act out different sex positions to demonstrate what they wanted the actors to do’. Mikey Madison carries the film truthfully (or as truthfully as is possible) and powerfully.
Boyish Mark Eydelshteyn looks very right and is funny – especially in a gymnastic move on the bed when Vanya and Ani first sleep together – until Vanya’s alarmingly jejune character is fully revealed. The outstanding supporting performance, however, comes from Yura Borisov (excellent too in Compartment No 6 (2021)). As the taciturn, uncomfortable Igor, Borisov has a head start: with everyone around him so volubly loud, he’s bound to stand out. Once he’s wrestled noisily with Ani to pin her down, Igor is a man of few words but Borisov hits the target with every single line. To be fair, Vache Tovmasyan, on a rare opportunity to underplay, also scores. Garnick gets kicked in the face by Ani – probably gets his nose broken. When Toros reels off to her the crimes she could be charged with, Garnick feelingly but sotto voce, adds ‘assault’ to the list.
As I write this, there are 158 critics’ reviews of Anora on Rotten Tomatoes and all but two are fresh. The film is hotly tipped for major success in the coming awards season. I don’t really get this. The film is way too long (139 minutes) – it could lose half an hour without losing much else. As indicated above, Ani’s crucial transformation from material girl to betrayed romantic is contrived. Even so, I can see Anora has merits: each of the main characters, repetitive as they are, is well played; the same yelled expletives account for a lot of the dialogue but the mixture of English and Russian (and Armenian?) is a big help in sustaining the chaotic momentum. All in all, I find it easier to understand how people can admire the film than how they can enjoy it. I found it gruelling to sit through because it’s often visually and sonically challenging; and lowering, because it describes lives that, to be honest, horrify me. A few of the headline reviews of Rotten Tomatoes’ ‘Top Critics’ give a clue to Anora’s appeal. The film ‘takes audiences on one wild ride’ (Randy Myers); watching it ‘is like riding shotgun alongside a reckless driver’ (Leonard Maltin); ‘our pulses race, our eyes grow wide, our hearts dance …’ (Kristy Puchko). In other words, Anora is, literally, sensational: it makes us really feel.
Judging by some audience reactions at the screening I was at, it doesn’t matter how transient or contradictory those feelings are. When Galina pressures her to board the plane to Las Vegas where the marriage will be annulled, Ani says she won’t be doing anything until she gets a lawyer; she informs her mother-in-law that she didn’t sign a pre-nup, is going to sue and will end up with half of what Vanya’s worth. Cue gales of applause in the Festival Hall: yay, our feisty girl’s gonna show them, and win big! Never mind that Galina, coldly contemptuous, replies that Ani hasn’t a hope of winning a law suit (the Zakharovs will prove she’s a penniless gold-digger) – or that Ani immediately accepts defeat and gets on the plane. After signing the annulment paperwork, Ani prepares to take her leave of the Zakharovs. When Galina says good riddance and brands her a whore, Ani comes back with, ‘Yes, and your son hates you so much he was prepared to marry a whore to get away from you’. Another yay moment but the audience liked it even more that Ani’s riposte gets Nikolai Zakharov laughing. It’s true Aleksei Serebryakov does this very well: his face hasn’t cracked up to this point so Nikolai’s gleeful mirth is bound to have impact. But it baffled me that people could take pleasure in the pleasure of a character whose vast fortune is the root cause of his son’s feckless cruelty. Those in stitches at Nikolai’s laughter just seemed to be following suit: well, he’s enjoying himself so I will, too.
It becomes pretty obvious that Ani will end up with Igor, who escorts her back from Las Vegas to New York to pack up her belongings. On her last night in the Zakharov mansion, they have a mutually wary – but sometimes mutually amused – conversation, though nothing more. Next morning, he drives her back to her own tiny Brooklyn home. He gives her the $10,000 compensation payment she was promised by Toros. Igor has also managed to get hold of the wedding ring that Toros took from her, and returns it to Ani. She says little but initiates sex with him, in the front of the car. When he tries to kiss her, Ani recoils. She then bursts into tears and lets Igor hold her; in Anora‘s closing shot she’s still in his arms. I just don’t respond to this film the way lots of others do. I not only can’t share the enthusiasm of reviewers I’ve read; I also tend to disagree with their few reservations. Here’s another Rotten Tomatoes ‘Top Critic’, Olivia Hunter Willke: ‘Although the film carries its head high for nearly the entire runtime, it might just undersell itself in the last moments’. I think these moments – when the film starts taking its time in a good way – are the best moments.
15 October 2024
