Here is an anti-fairytale of New York, complete with drifts of snow and mounds of coke and cars as big as bars lined up in the basement garage. It’s about an exotic dancer called Ani who marries a Russian rich kid called Vanya and gets to briefly play-act the princess at a lavish Brooklyn mansion. But her handsome prince is a pumpkin and the wedding hangover will be brutal. Even the muscle cars in the garage serve no earthly purpose. “I’m not allowed to drive them,” says Vanya. “Because my parents are dicks.”
Or to put it more bluntly, life is a mess, the American dream is a lie and Hollywood romcoms are fictions, if not outright hucksterism. Sean Baker’s Anora provides an acid corrective in that it takes a movie like Pretty Woman and sticks it under a crime-scene lamp to show us the stains on the sheets and the thumbprints on the crystal. But crucially his film is not a downer. It’s fierce, fresh and funny, barely missing a beat and making its 140-minute running time pass by at a gallop. Baker’s previous pictures (Tangerine, The Florida Project, the underrated Red Rocket) had already shown him to be an exuberant guide to America’s underbelly. Anora, though, is his most heartfelt, illuminating, fully realised work to date. The darker it gets, the more bold and bright it becomes.
This premiered at the Cannes film festival, where it went on to win the Palme d’Or and was hailed as a triumph both for Baker and for 25-year-old Mikey Madison, who gives a breakout performance in the title role. Ani (officially Anora on the marriage licence) never really loves Vanya (perfectly embodied by Mark Eydelshteyn), because he’s a spoilt brat, still a child, merrily living off his parents’ cash. But she is smart enough to realise that her options are limited and tough enough not to buckle when the romance hits the buffers. Her chief tormentor is Igor (Yura Borisov), one of a trio of goons who are promptly dispatched to annul the marriage. And yet the film shakes the bottle and keeps all its characters in flux. And just as Vanya turns out to not be Ani’s fairytale prince, so dogged, hapless Igor isn’t quite the monster that his name and bearing suggests.
Every generation, perhaps, gets the romantic comedy it deserves. Anora is the Runaway Bride for Trump-era America, spotlighting a country that’s riddled with oligarch money and influence; mechanistic and amoral as it pivots from the Manhattan strip club to the Vegas wedding chapel. But while it’s a film of its time – full of noise, full of bling – this also harks back to Hollywood’s golden age, to the point where it plays like a Depression-era screwball comedy. The rules of the genre provide Anora with its bedrock. The sense of shared cultural history gives its characters common ground.
I loved Anora’s breakneck opening half, in which Ani is drunk on her fairytale and dares to believe in happy endings. But the hangover that follows is just sublime; it’s what vaults the film to a different level and gives the tale its emotional punch. First the goons break in and tear down Ani’s idyll. Then they march her at night through Brighton Beach to Coney Island. It’s an older New York neighbourhood, predominantly Russian working class, and more familiar to these people than the modernist mansion on the hill. The night is cold and the mood is bitter – and yet somewhere en route a gradual thaw has set in. Technically, Ani and Igor are searching for the irksome Vanya, who’s absconded. In reality, they’re remembering who they are and where they come from.
