Anora

Sean Baker ranks as one of the great chroniclers of our contemporary era in no small part because he's one of the only American filmmakers who explores the country's ever-increasing, ever-more-crippling wealth gap with both empathy and a sharp satirical edge. Sure, there are dozens of eat-the-rich pictures like Triangle of Sadness, The Menu, Saltburn, Infinity Pool, Ready or Not, etc., and these movies provide some surface-level commentary and deliver schadenfreudec delights, but what Baker does is far more substantive. His films are rich character studies about folks living on or below the poverty line with a level of depth and detail that illudes most American filmmakers who tackle this subject by setting out with lofty pretensions and ending up, at best, making feel-good-downers about resilient individualists living at the economic edge, like Nomadland. Baker's films don't even come close to feeling precious or pretentious and avoid being labeled "poverty porn," even though he is a middle-class white guy who makes movies almost exclusively about marginalized subcultures. What sets Baker's movies apart from Hollywood's earnest attempts to grapple with the economic disparity in contemporary culture has less to do with the DIY, independent nature of his productions and more to do with how laugh-out-loud funny his films are. The humor, which springs forth directly from the characters rather than from some outsider perspective, is the most impressive quality of all of Baker's work.

Anora, which ushered Baker to a new level of visibility and success when it won the Palm 'dor at this year's Cannes Film Festival, is the director's funniest picture yet. Though it combines elements of several genres, it's first and foremost a screwball comedy. The title character is played by Mikey Madison (probably best known for her small role as Manson family murderer Susan "Sadie" Atkins in Quentin Tarantino's Once Upon a Time in Hollywood). Like the leads in Baker's Starlet, Tangerine, The Florida Project, and Red Rocket, Anora, or "Ani," makes at least part of her living through sex work. She's a hardworking hustler who we meet while she's at work inside a busy, sprawling Brooklyn strip club. Baker's camera tracks all around the club, delving deep into the daily routine of someone engaged in this profession. Ani occasionally sees customers that she meets there outside of work hours if they seem like good prospects. She is depicted as neither empowered nor trapped by her situation; she's just a person with a job.

She speaks a little Russian thanks to her Uzbek grandmother, so one night, she is assigned to entertain Ivan "Vanya" Zakharov (Mark Eidelshtein), the debauched playboy son of an obscenely wealthy Russian oligarch. Vanya takes a shine to Ani and invites her to his home. The next day, she arrives at the lavish mansion his parents have furnished and provides him with a highly enjoyable night of sex, drugs, video games, and light conversation. The impressionable young man begins to fall in love with Ani, inviting her to his New Year's Eve party and then offering her a deal where he'll pay her handsomely to be his exclusive girlfriend for a week. Ani ain't no fool. She agrees to this arrangement, ready to milk this naive and seemingly harmless innocent for all she can get from him. But before she knows it, the two are tying the knot in a Las Vegas wedding chapel, and Ani is taking the vows seriously. That's when all hell breaks loose. Vanya's parents are not going to allow their son to marry someone not selected by them, and they sure as hell aren't going to let him stay married to "just some hooker!" They dispatch their Armenian fixer, Ivan's godfather Toros (Karren Karagulian), and his henchmen Igor (Yura Borisov) and Garnick (Vache Tovmasyan) to confront the couple.

The extended sequence of their first confrontation is where this picture fully announces itself as a comedy. Ani simply will not listen to these enforcers, whose attempts to subdue her end up with them getting violently attacked and injured as she hilariously resists their attempts at intimidation, destroying much of Vanya's living room in the process. When Ani flees the house, a lengthy hunt is incited for the escaped bride. Toros and his goons are desperate to re-capture Ani and arrange for this ill-conceived marriage to be annulled before Vanya's parents arrive in America to whisk their foolhardy son back to Russia.

The classic Screwball this movie most reminded me of is My Man Godfrey, the 1936 film set during the Great Depression with William Powell as "forgotten man" Godfrey Parke who, through a series of comical circumstances, becomes butler to the eccentric family of Carole Lombard's ditzy Manhattan socialite Irene Bullock. But in this case, the foul-mouthed Ani stands in for the refined Godfrey, while Vayna, the dimwit pampered into permanent adolescence, takes the place of the spoiled but goodhearted Irene. Everyone trying to get these two to annul their marriage is some combination of Irene's gruff businessman father, Alexander (screwball staple Eugene Pallette), and the freeloading foreigner, Carlo (played by Mischa Auer). Like My Man Godfrey, Anora never allows its inspired zaniness to overpower its themes, but neither does it wear its subtext and its message on its sleeve (or, in this case, on its g-string).

The only trouble is that, because of their manic energy, screwball comedies work best when they're short and sweet, and Anora clocks in at 139 minutes. Now, I am not one of these jaded, elderly film critics who complain that movies are too long these days, but comedies thrive on brevity. Anora also recalls post-Golden-Age classics of the one-crazy-night subgenre like After Hours or The Out of Towners , and these films also work best when under 100 minutes. Anora has an odd dichotomy in that it successfully exists as two distinctly different types of movies that are nonetheless at odds with each other. The zany comedy is somewhat undercut by the leisurely, nuanced exploration of the main character's world. The set-up in the strip club alone seems to last the length of a typical Screwball's entire first act, and that outstanding living room fight scene—which I'm sure will end up being the most memorable sequence in any movie this year—would take up more than a third of the running time of many classic screwball comedies. The extended length of each scene, sequence, and set piece, as well as the film overall, makes for somewhat of a bumpy ride. At least upon first viewing, we don't always feel like the filmmaker is in control of his story, but I'm not sure that's a drawback for a movie like this.

Fortunately, the comedy does not undercut the character study. Indeed, like all of Baker's work, the laughs are what make these seemingly extreme characters so relatable. Even the Russian and Armenian henchmen, who would undoubtedly be played as broad caricatures in a pure screwball comedy, are richly drawn. As wonderfully played by Borisov and Tovmasyan, these two start out as bumbling buffoons ill-equipped to handle the job they've been assigned, but they develop into multi-dimensional characters that engage every bit as much as the protagonists with the picture's subtle commentary about the limited options for those who live at both the upper and lower ends of our restrictive, dehumanizing system of Capitalism.

Of course, the breakout star of Anora is the actress who plays her. Twenty-five-year-old Madison pours her heart, soul, and physical self into every scene of this movie, handling the dancing, the fights, and the sex scenes with aplomb. Ani is a tough, smart cookie, more than capable of taking care of herself, but that doesn't prevent her from longing to break free of the status she's been assigned by the life and the persona she's created for herself to survive. Madison makes Ani as touchingly vulnerable as she is thrillingly fierce, and these distinctive traits are never in conflict with each other.