Anything For Love: ANORA

Anora is a hustler who’ll do whatever it takes to enjoy life and afford it, too. She’s a likable striver. There’s an earthy, street smart appeal to her hard-charging, relentless Brooklyn pursuit of her own survival. Yet there’s also something sweet and even romantic about her underdog status. It’s easy to root for her, and hope she’ll continue to grow into her power. She’s making ends meet, however tenuously, as a stripper expert in how to talk money out of her clients. She has a big smile, wears tight dresses, and has a fluttery flirtatious patter to her speech. (It’s like she went to the same elocution and movement lessons as The Nanny’s Fran Drescher or My Cousin Vinny-era Marisa Tomei.) She also seems to enjoy her job, especially getting flattering reactions with her body. At first glance, you might think she’s the stereotypical "hooker with a heart of gold,” but that heart of hers is not quite so golden, and that particular after-hours sex work is an incidental side-hustle here undertaken almost on a whim. She’s invited by the spoiled son of a Russian oligarch to spend a week as a well-paid girlfriend. She sees easy money, but also genuinely enjoys being around the gangly guy, who is enthusiastic and effusive in his praise and through his urges, as well as energetically in need of her coaching to be a better lover. Maybe they’re even falling into something like real love.

This is Anora, the latest character piece from writer-director Sean Baker, who always sends out the shock troops of frank sexual content to clear the path for humor, empathy, and even sentimentality, to rush in while still maintaining a clear-eyed assessment of his characters’ flaws. He also loves a good pressure-cooker that lets all of this play out with full inappropriateness in an immediacy of compressed timelines or high stakes or both. There’s the sleazy porn star hoping to woo a naive 17-year-old into filming with him on her next birthday in Red Rocket. There is the poor single mother and her young daughter about to be evicted from their cheap hotel home in The Florida Project. There’s the trans sex worker chasing down her cheating ex-con boyfriend on Christmas Eve in Tangerine. He fills up their stories with specificity and understanding, even while drawing out the comedy and tragedy of their experiences. So it is with Anora, in which he finds a flurry of activity that matches the whirlwind romance of its opening sequences. The 23-year-old stripper (Mikey Madison) loves the lifestyle the boyish 21-year-old billionaire (Mark Eydelshteyn) provides. He throws huge parties, spends lots of money in every shop and club, and impulsively flies on a private jet to Vegas. She’s along every step of the way, and loving it. But soon he’ll be called back to Russia to work for his parents’ business, and he’s thinking a quick marriage to keep him in America might be advantageous. Besides, they’re definitely attracted to each other. Win-win. Here’s a movie that builds on these human impulses for connections and survival and sex, and finds them grow into a realist screwball comedy as her fiancé’s family makes moves to stop the match. Pressure’s on. The initial whirlwind narrows to a one-crazy-day-and-night momentum that tests this burgeoning relationship, and Anora’s future.

In Baker’s telling, the story breathes with the surprises of life. The movie starts with what seems an obvious trajectory—love conquers all?—and then complicates with the unexpected. The people on screen are characterized on the move as we join them in a consequential few weeks. We aren’t overburdened by backstory or unduly concerned with exposition. Instead, we see them behave and react in the moment and start to sense the complexity and humanity underpinning their foibles and fears, their desires and despairs. The ensemble spinning around them—from fellow strippers to Russian flunkies—are similarly glimpsed in suggestion and sketches as parts of a full world of which we only get a glimpse. It makes their stories feel all the more impactful and believable, playing out in a casual display. Even when the plot pushes against excesses, it does so with an honest sense of what the world is like for the super-rich and the working class alike. (His camera will linger equally on conspicuous consumption and the maids, security guards, and managers making it possible.) Baker lets his actors play even the cleverest, most darting and daring dialogues and situations with an unhurried natural chemistry and matter-of-fact gestures. And he films them with a simple, sumptuous eye that captures the natural cinema of everyday detail, wrapped in the ever-so-heightened gloss of The Movies (he loves a good montage, a well-chosen lens flare, a gauzy primary-color light) brought down to street level observation. That leaves a movie as entertaining and surprising as it is clear-eyed and tender-hearted. That’s a moving mix. Here’s a film that loves its characters, and watches as life catches them unaware and takes them somewhere they’d never have expected.