Since winning the coveted Palme D’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, there’s been a lot of buzz surrounding Sean Baker’s dramedy Anora. After finally seeing the film at TIFF 2024, it’s easy to see why. It’s a wildly entertaining story that displays a lot of care for its characters, courtesy of great writing and even better performances.
The titular Anora (or Ani, as she prefers to be called) is a working-class, Brooklyn-based stripper who, thanks to her basic understanding of conversational Russian, gets called to by her manager to entertain Russian-speaking clients. One of those clients in particular is Ivan, a.k.a. “Vanya” (Mark Edelstein), the hyperactive young son of a rich Russian oligarch. Vanya offers Ani $15,000 dollars to be his girlfriend for a week, which she surprisingly accepts.
Ani gets swept up in Vanya’s lavish, hedonistic lifestyle, and despite the transactional nature of their relationship, legitimate sparks start flying between the two. At the end of that week, during a trip to Vegas, Vanya spontaneously proposes to Ani, which she also surprisingly accepts. Madison, best known for her memorable turn in 2022’s Scream, delivers a truly star-making performance throughout Anora. Despite the brash exterior, she’s so charismatic and charming that you legitimately can’t take your eyes off her the whole runtime.
Similar to Baker’s previous sex-work-centered films like Tangerine and Red Rocket, the movie itself never condescends Ani’s profession of choice. She’s good at what she does, and she enjoys it, but it’s still working to make ends meet for her and her sister. Whenever a character tries to dismiss her by labelling her merely a prostitute, she’s quick to bite back with twice the venom and three times the curse words. I also love her dynamics with the strip club’s staff, especially her rivalry with fellow stripper Diamond (Lindsay Normington).
“Anora is a movie that will definitely garner awards at the end of the year, and for my money, a Best Actress nomination for Madison is all but guaranteed.”
The first act feels like a sudden dream come true for Anora…until Ivan’s parents get word of the marriage. Angered by the potential damage to their family’s reputation, they send his godfather Toros (Karren Karagulian) and a pair of reluctant goons (Vache Tovmasyan and Yura Borisov) to force the duo to annul the marriage and deport Vanya back to Russia. In the chaos, Vanya flees, forcing the other characters to search up and down New York to retrieve him before his parents arrive the next day.
From that moment, the film turns from Pretty Woman to Uncut Gems. Characters are yelling over each other, people get injured, and it’s all-out insanity. Even though these scenes run longer than they need to, it still feels every bit as intense as it is laugh-out-loud hilarious to see these goons repeatedly try and fail to subdue a girl half their size. All of these characters, even during the more chaotic moments, feel like real people simply caught in a messy situation, thanks to Baker’s strong script.
With how high-energy the first acts were, I was taken aback at how much of a gut-punch the last act was. It becomes a sobering crash to reality for both Ani and the audience. Even though you know from the get-go that Anora and Ivan’s relationship is not going to last, you’re still rooting for Ani as she still chooses to believe that there’s still something special between them other than money or sex. When it’s callously dismissed by Ivan’s family, it’s all the more painful, especially in the movie’s final scene.
Anora is a movie that will definitely garner awards at the end of the year, and for my money, a Best Actress nomination for Madison is all but guaranteed. Baker manages to balance out the movie’s wild variety of tone shifts with just very good storytelling and care for these characters, flaws and all. It’s surely one of the best movies I’ve seen at TIFF this year so far.
Check out more of CGMagazine’s TIFF 2024 coverage here throughout the festival.
