Review: Anora (2024)

As legacy pundits struggle to understand the cultural shift that led to Trumpworld’s return on November 5th, isolating its first rumblings has proven most difficult. Sydney Sweeney’s February SNL hosting stint may have started it all. True, too for the director of Twisters’s emphatic promises that the film intentionally avoids talk of climate change in the lead up to its box office dominance last summer. But the real harbinger of things to come happened last May when American director Sean Baker won Cannes’s Palme d'Or and became an Oscar frontrunner for his latest regional character study, Anora. 

Superficially, Anora has all the hallmarks of pat indie sensations past that induce a sense of amnesia soon after their year-end awards runs: a Brighton Beach setting full of grit and what passes for realism, a focus on twentysomething stripper Ani (Mikey Madison) that approaches its sex and nudity with nonchalance, and a distanced probing of how the other half live. Always a singular filmmaker, Baker has long self-sabotaged his otherwise engaging works about American lowlifes like The Florida Project and Red Rocket through an almost anthropological gaze that has never quite shaken off an air of superiority. But in detailing Ani’s impromptu nuptials to the son of a Russian oligarch (Mark Eidelstein) and his family's forceful attempts to annul the marriage, Baker taps into a sense of sheer artistry rarely seen since the heyday of American 70s cinema. 

Though Anora works largely due to the impeccable casting of Madison and Yuriy Borisov as a put-upon Armenian pseudo-hood, Baker’s choice to anchor his world within the realm of Russian-American strivers and smalltime oligarchs gunning for global respect allows him to rewrite romcom and indie conventions without ever descending into the most obvious strains of white liberal guilt. Indeed, Anora may well be the first study of urban deplorables awakening to the hollowness of their betters and rediscovering the powers of authentic masculinity in a culture hostile to such notions. As Baker so eloquently posits, Ani doesn’t have to deny her heritage and second-generation identity as she strives for legitimacy; she’s been more than legitimate all along.

Anora is now playing in theaters.