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.
