Carriages, Pumpkins and Stripper Poles

It’s a tale as old as time. Girl meets boy. They fall in love. They get married and live happily ever after — until boy’s family sends confused henchmen to forcefully annul the marriage. Sean Baker has long blurred the line between fairy tale and American neorealism. “Tangerine” and “The Florida Project” followed characters struggling on the outskirts of Hollywood and Disney World, framing dreams and glistening fantasies shoulder-to-shoulder with the grim realities of poverty and violence. “Anora,” a devastating class dramedy about a Brooklyn sex worker’s whirlwind romance with the spoiled son of a Russian oligarch, continues this trajectory, taking Baker’s signature blend of genres and modalities to dizzying new heights. 

The first American film to win the coveted Palme d’Or at Cannes since 2011’s “The Tree of Life,” “Anora” feels like a sophisticated homage to the classic Hollywood films of Billy Wilder and Ernst Lubitsch, supercharged with the seedy New York indie energy of the Safdie brothers (“Uncut Gems”). It also sees Baker return to the immigrant themes and milieus of “Take Out,” his 2004 lo-fi immigrant drama set in Manhattan’s Chinatown, and “Tangerine,” his 2015 breakout about trans sex workers and an Armenian immigrant cab driver in Los Angeles. 

“Anora’s” chaotic series of hilarious misunderstandings begins in a neon-lit strip club, where an exotic dancer named Ani (Mikey Madison) — short for Anora — works the stage, as an up-tempo remix of Take That’s “Greatest Day” appears non-diegetically atop the soundtrack, emphasizing the dreamlike setting, and cinematographer Drew Daniels sends dazzling lens flares through the corners of the frame. This hypnotic intro abruptly shifts to a much more naturalistic depiction of the venue: muffled music blaring through the club’s speakers, the camera cutting back to an observational distance to show Ani wandering from patron to patron. When a high-rolling, mostly Russian-speaking client, the childlike Ivan “Vanya” Zakharov (Mark Eydelshteyn), requests a girl with whom he can communicate, Ani is the beneficiary, as she remembers a little of the Russian her immigrant grandmother taught her. Ani and Vanya charm each other with their youth — both are in their early 20s — and broken speech in foreign tongues. Before long, Vanya hires Ani to visit him at his sprawling mansion, a transactional relationship that blossoms into a genuine connection.

A trip to Vegas later, the duo marry in secret, and for a moment, all appears to be well. The couple’s union solves the problem of Ani’s living situation (a cramped Brighton Beach apartment with a nightmare roommate), and seems, to Vanya, enough of an excuse to stop his parents from haranguing him to join his father’s business in Russia. However, this hastily constructed paradise gives way to slapstick trouble when the local Armenian priest hired to watch over Vanya, Toros (longtime Baker collaborator Karren Karagulian), gets chewed out for letting him elope. With seasoned Armenian henchman Garnick (Vache Tovmasyan) and overly polite Russian newcomer Igor (Yura Borisov) in tow, Toros attempts to separate the young lovers in time for the Zakharovs’ transatlantic arrival. This yields, within the movie’s 138-minute runtime, a nearly hour-long screwball comedy of errors — involving Ani and the henchmen teaming up to find a drunk and absconding Vanya — that makes the seemingly arthouse “Anora” a candidate for the director’s first multiplex hit. 

This extended climax requires all of Baker’s considerable talents, but he pulls off a deft balance between physical humor, physical violence — Igor doesn’t want to restrain Ani, but he needs the money — and interrogations of the American dream. Notably, he imbues the chaos of the film’s final hour with subtle treatments of camaraderie and class solidarity, deepened with fleeting reaction shots in which the immigrant Igor empathizes with Ani’s predicament even as he compounds it. 

Baker’s naturalistic cinema has long explored the stratification of class, not just as a number in one’s bank account, but as a complex set of cultural indicators — from clothing to speech — that impact the perception of others and oneself. Baker is especially concerned with the professions and life options of the poor, most notably sex workers and the way they are looked down upon by society. From the vulnerable Black and Latina trans escorts of “Tangerine,” to the former male porn star in “Red Rocket” struggling to find retail work in the shadow of a Texas oil refinery, few American filmmakers have shown as much empathy toward sex work as Baker. 

In “Anora,” it seems, if only briefly, as if one of his characters will finally be allowed to escape the harsh circumstances of their lives. But it’s a trap-door ending. In Baker’s America, there’s no breaking free from the confines of class. For Ani, marrying “upward” only makes her the target of the Zakharovs’ suspicion and scorn. And as much as Vanya might adore Ani, he decides he loves his party-boy lifestyle and parents’ money even more. Thus does Baker’s latest fairy tale curdle into another poisoned apple, one that keeps the dreams of the downtrodden continually out of reach.