Sean Baker has a thing for sex workers. The fiercely independent director’s 2015 breakthrough work Tangerine followed Sin-Dee Rella (Kitana Kiki Rodriguez), a transgender sex worker, who just got out of prison and is ready to take revenge on her cheating boyfriend. In his next film, The Florida Project, a stripper named Halley (Bria Vinaite) loses her job for refusing to have sex with clients, and is thrown into extreme poverty with her six-year-old daughter. Baker’s 2021 film Red Rocket starred Simon Rex as Mikey “Saber” Davies, a down-on-his luck porn star who returns to his Texas hometown, looking for a way to get back on top.
Now, in his latest venture, Baker has created his latest, and greatest sex worker character yet, Anora “Ani” Mikheeva. Played by Mikey Madison, whose breakthrough role was as Manson Family murderer Susan Atkins in Once Upon A Time In Hollywood, Ani is a stripper in a high-end Manhattan gentleman’s club called HQ. She lives with her sister in Brighton Beach, where her Russian immigrant grandmother taught her the language of the home country. Those Russian language skills come in handy when her boss tells her to look after a high roller named Vanya (Mark Eydelshteyn).
I love films about work, particularly ones about the differences between the masks we wear in the public personae we bring to the workplace, and who we think we really are. That dichotomy is never greater than for a sex worker. From the moment Ani meets Vanya, her carefully constructed stripper facade starts to crumble. Vanya is too good to be true. He’s a 21-year-old college student who never goes to class with a seemingly unlimited supply of money. When she realizes he really digs her, she naturally decides to get busy exploiting him for all he’s worth, performing “forbidden” acts in the private room as the money rains down. When he asks her for a private session, she says yes. When she arrives at his home, she’s taken aback. This skinny kid lives in a waterfront mansion with gorgeous views of the city. The private sessions go so well, he invites her to his New Year’s Eve party. The mansion is lit up and filled to brim with well-heeled young revelers and disco lights. As the party is still raging, they retire to his bedroom, where he asks for a week of her time, in exchange for $10,000 cash. What’s a girl to do but say yes?
Ani is dazzled by the money, the drugs, and Vanya’s disarming, boyish look. For her $10K week, they could just lounge around the house and get freaky, but instead, Vanya loads up his friends into a private jet and they head to Las Vegas, where they can get “the good ketamine.” It is there that Ani, and the audience, get their first taste of who Vanya really is. They are greeted at the door of the luxury hotel and casino by the manager, who assures Vanya that he can have his usual suite as soon as they’re finished kicking out the guests who are staying there now. Vanya, it turns out, is Ivan Zakharov, the son of a ruthless Russian oligarch (Aleksei Serebryakov) with ties to Russian organized crime in America.
The trip plays out like a fever dream of wealth, as the boisterous friends float from pool to party to IV hangover bar and back again. Ani never wants the party to end, and when one morning, Vanya professes his love for her and asks her to marry him so he can become a citizen and escape from the clutches of his dysfunctional wealthy family, she says yes. Since they’re already conveniently in Vegas, the happy couple ties the knot in a wedding chapel on the Strip. The bride wore blue jeans and a bustier.
Just as Ani’s mask totally slips away, heir honeymoon is interrupted when Vanya’s parents get wind of the nuptials. They task Toros (frequent Baker collaborator Karren Karagulian), a Russian Orthodox priest/gangland fixer, with arranging an annulment. He sends two goons, Garnick (Vache Tovmasyan) and Igor (Yura Borisov) to get to the bottom of the situation. Their arrival at the mansion is a 20-minute tour de force of queasy slapstick which veers from the hilarious to the horrifying.
The world Baker builds is at once exotic and all too real. Madison is absolutely perfect as a Cinderella who gets a glimpse of ultimate upward mobility, only to have it all crash down around her in a flurry of broken glass, baseball bats, and trashed SUVs. Anora is a gorgeous film that walks the line between screwball comedy and tragedy. Only someone with mad skills like Sean Baker can choose to do both.