Of all its tricks, 'Anora'’s best is that it will break your heart

DYLAN FREEMAN-GRIST
This article contains partial spoilers for Anora (2024)

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At various points throughout Anora you may find yourself reaching for the gear shift in your head. With frequent reorientation needed as its tone, genre, and character’s motivations flip on a dime.

Its opening establishes what could very well be a feminist heist movie set in New York’s sex industry, an art house Hustlers with better cinematography and stronger acting. Here we are introduced to our hero: the titular Anora - though she prefers Ani. She’s a dancer and escort working out of the Headquarters Strip Club in Manhattan. The venue is seedy, the male clients pathetic and boring, but the girls are getting their money and living as large as they can. Ani is the club’s star, she navigates its floor, stage, and private rooms with an endearing bravado and power. Under its commodified gaze she finds respite from an otherwise mundane life spent smoking cigarettes on the front-step of an apartment she shares with her sister tucked under an MTA line. We may be excused as an audience for suspecting some plot opportunity will present itself for the club’s entire ensemble. A high-flying, rags-to-riches salvo is prime for the taking. 

Instead the opportunity is singular to Ani. It takes the form of a new return client, a younger man (or man child) named Ivan who is the son of a googleable oligarch in Russia. Ani charms him with her broken ancestral Russian - among her other talents - and after a night at the club and some follow-up house calls he pays her to be his girlfriend for a week. It’s then that the familiar trappings of the film’s opening are peeled away for a hazy stoner comedy. The “couple” begin partying frequently with Ivan’s entourage, a group of young wage workers he has assembled from various pockets of New York that, like Ani, are now living high on Ivan's dime. They hop from club to club until they end up under the glaring lights of Las Vegas.

Of course an undercurrent of tension bubbles. On Ivan’s arm, Ani may fit in perfectly with this group of strangers but we know deeper down she is an outsider who came from a completely separate world. Headquarters - for what it’s worth - was a familiar place where she had power, stability, and allies. In contrast, the edges of this one has ominous brokers from Ivan’s distinct reality looking on - and she is all alone. 

Mikey Madison is being heralded as a breakout star for her interpretation of Ani. The film’s Palm D’Or has earned the project Oscar buzz largely off the back of her performance. However even if it’s snubbed by The Academy (as Director Sean Baker’s best film The Florida Project was) Anora will still be remembered as the moment that Madison reached those upper echelons. For all of time then you can look nowhere other than these scenes - where Madison's Ani suddenly finds herself swept into Ivan’s artificial world - to witness that nova’s origin.

Ani is suddenly removed from the need for the hardened shell she has built around herself. In response, Madison decides that across this extended sequence Ani will be set free. While Ani remains ever aware of the absurdity of her situation, she chooses to unravel the coil around herself regardless. At some brilliantly indistinct point during that week she spends with Ivan she feels safe enough - maybe for the first time in her life - to drop her guard and trust her company.

Despite what you may see in the film's marketing, Anora is not a love story by any means, Ani never falls truly in love with Ivan in a romantic sense, but somewhere she decides she can at least be friends with him, and that his naive and carefree approach to life is a welcome change to the doldrums of her own. Most importantly we see her forge a belief that she is well deserving of the same happiness that flows so easily to those like him.

Even if a lesser actor had approached Ani with the same intent, I think very few would have been able to deliver her with the subtle power, vulnerability, and grace that Madison arrives at while atop this contextual tightrope. In a parallel universe another version of Anora exists that is just a funny dark comedy about a tough-as-nails Brooklyn escort taking on the family of a Russian oligarch. That movie is fine, but Madison has built up our version of Ani as a character worth remembering for something other than her ability to brawl, and in doing so she has put Anora on the map.

As the week ends, the love-struck Ivan finally proposes to Ani. If the story is working for you I think this moment should catch in your throat. We all want our girl to win, but we cannot forget that she appears to be flying far too close to the sun.

When Ivan’s family finally becomes aware of the newlyweds the confrontation leads to a high moment of suspense and a genuine fear for Ani’s safety. But that is just a pop - another sleight of hand from Baker who is not interested in that kind of story and never has been. Ivan’s family is powerful, yes. They are not above crossing ethical lines to split their union, but they, and the foot soldiers who do their bidding, are more bumbling and incompetent buffoons than hardline criminals.

Naturally, Ivan opts to leave Ani behind, fleeing her and his parents to go on a bender somewhere in the city. Anora then settles into a drawn-out dark comedy as Ani and the group hired to fix the mess attempt to track him down. Family favors have been arranged to set a sunrise appointment for a shotgun annulment and Ani is complying with in protest. Like Ani - the crew the family has coerced into retrieving Ivan are also tethered by their own bizarre circumstance to his destructive actions. While we can’t say that the group ever form a lasting friendship, a tense camaraderie and mutual understanding takes shape which helps navigate the film to its ending.

I think a lot of critics may feel this is where Anora loses momentum. It is no longer firing on all cylinders, just marching under duress to a forgone conclusion. But there is a great tragedy simmering just under its surface. The careful work Madison had done to show Ani breaking down her walls in the film's opening is just as brilliantly undone as the search for Ivan drags on. Realizing she is being walked back to the life she came from, Ani reassembles that wall piece by piece. As the sun rises over New York, the inner light she claimed for herself has been all but extinguished.

Anora never achieves the shlock of the crime drama it role plays as early on, but there is a real violence directed at Ani on display. Many will recognize in her a similar exhaustion that takes hold as we change who we are to make ends meet. She demonstrates resolve in her search for her husband, and her final confrontations with his family through a familiar capacity to detach and numbly go on surviving.

Baker is undoubtedly a master of telling stories about the haves and have-nots. The Florida Project remains his best rendering of this, and if you love a gear shifting roller coaster of a plot then Red Rocket may be a more entertaining romp along the same thematic lines. Anora finds a way to forge a more careful compromise between these two. Still, like all of Baker’s projects it is not shy in stating clearly that for those like Ani true happiness will always be something experienced by other people. That certain souls are destined to spend their lives treading storm waters whisked up by those who never face the consequences of their actions.

A lot of attempts have been and will be made to interpret the movie’s final scene. For me personally, I think if you’ve ever reached the end of a long day where you were asked to carve out another piece of yourself, you won’t need an explanation for why the movie ends as it does. It will just hurt.

Anora is currently playing at the TIFF Bell Lightbox and will begin a run at The Fox Theatre Nov. 8th.

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