by Sophie Terakes
Worth: $19.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Mikey Madison, Mark Eydelshteyn, Karren Karagulian, Vache Tovmasyan and Yura Borisov
Intro:
… feverish and utterly exhilarating …
The world of Anora is like a dazzling jewel. It twinkles and gleams when it catches the light, but its glittering veneer belies a cold edge. Sean Baker’s superb new film follows the titular Anora (whose name, as one character aptly points out, means “light”) (Mikey Madison). Ani (as she prefers to be called) is a young exotic dancer and occasional sex worker from Brooklyn’s Brighton Beach, hardboiled by years of feigning affection to earn her living.
Ani’s dreams ostensibly come true when she meets a new client, Vanya Zakharov (Mark Eydelshteyn), the fresh-faced son of a Russian oligarch. Eydelshteyn is pitch perfect in the role, somersaulting into bed before their first sexual encounter, he plays a boy in men’s clothing with rakish ease. Charmed by Vanya’s goofy charisma and his money, Ani agrees to work as his “horny girlfriend” for a week. The pair travel to Las Vegas and, after a frenzy of fireworks, ketamine, candy and pashing, they elope in a little white chapel.
Renowned for his penchant for oversaturated colour palettes and gaudy sparkle, Baker (Starlet, Tangerine, The Florida Project, Red Rocket) paints Ani’s Pretty-Woman-esque fairy-tale in strokes of glorious light.
During their first conversation at the club where she works, Ani and Vanya’s faces are bathed in a crimson blaze. She grinds on his lap under red tinsel, sincerely revealing “I like you,” while the room twinkles with the rosy flame of commodified romance. During their cocaine-fuelled trip to Las Vegas with his friends, Ani enjoys the spoils of wealth, a dizzying hand-held shot showing the giddy lovers suffused in the rainbow haze of a shopping mall. Later, in bed, the pair are perfumed by a golden post-coital glow. Director of photography, Drew Daniels’ use of 35mm film provides these scenes with a granular texture, visually encasing the couple in a gauzy, champagne-flavoured bubble of bliss that we hope will never burst.
Yet, once the newlyweds return to Vanya’s heavily-staffed Brooklyn compound, the sparkle quickly begins to fade, revealing the hard, dull light of the morning after. A trio of henchmen employed by Vanya’s enraged parents arrive to annul the marriage and Vanya cravenly flees.
Ani defends her American Dream ferociously, clinging to her Russian sable fur and four carat diamond ring as symbols of her legitimate membership of the Zakharov clan. However, her reverie proves impossible, the goons smashing up Ani’s glass panelled mansion and her illusions of social mobility. The sequence breathlessly careens towards total derangement, allowing Baker to inject the quasi-love story with a sense of foreboding that will never entirely disappear. Ani eventually forms a bond with the henchmen, but their constant presence keeps her desperation in tragically sharp focus.
While the film’s final moments are disquieting, from the ashes of Ani’s marriage, a new star, Madison, is born. Madison wears Ani’s magnetism with cool composure, wrapping her clients (and cinematic audiences) further around her finger with each flutter of her eyelashes and flick of her glitter streamed hair. She often interlaces her character’s brazen confidence with her vulnerability, Baker’s softly-lit closeups capturing the deep pools of despair stored behind her round, fluid features. Through his shimmering mode of filmmaking, Baker weaves a heartbreaking tale of infatuation and injustice. It’s feverish and utterly exhilarating, glimmering with the fragility and unrelenting determination of the heroine at its core.
