The Girl Can't Help It

Anora has romance and laughs, and a deep well of sorrow

[The Academy Awards are Sunday! That means I have four and a half days to finish my annual Oscar Nerd reviews of all the Best Picture nominees! Will I make it? Reviews of A Complete Unknown, The Brutalist, Conclave, Nickel Boys, Emilia Pérez, The Substance, and Wicked are already up, so I’m getting close! Maybe I’ll just put the last two up at alicublog — I know some of you are getting sick of this Photoplay shit! Patience, friends, either way!]

I think I discern, deep in the DNA of Anora, an unmade 60s romantic comedy starring Shirley MacLaine, in which a girl who is what used not to be called a sex worker seeks love and finally finds it in an unexpectedly place. Something like that happens in the actual Sean Baker movie; also there’s some madcap action that, with a little stylization, would not be out of place in a George Axelrod joint. But our eponymous heroine’s world is a little closer to the real one, for good or ill, than Axelrod’s, or Billy Wilder’s for that matter, and while it’s still a romantic comedy neither the dramatic beats nor the resolution are nearly as clear and bright.

Anora — she prefers “Ani” — is a Brighton Beach girl and an exotic dancer at HQ in Brooklyn. We meet her at work, soliciting and performing lap dances. She seems cheerful enough; though she’s got the kind of smile that always looks at least half-sorrowful (come to think of it, so did MacLaine), she takes the drawbacks of the job with good humor, as when she describes one client to a friend as “Indian Jeffrey Dahmer.” Any static she dispels with flat-faced toughness. She’s third generation Brooklyn Russian — “my grandmother never learned English” — which is why her boss steers her to a young high-roller for the old country who wants someone who can understand him.

The Russian kid, Ivan, is goofy, absurdly callow, and sexually inexperienced. Anora’s OK with that, not only because of the kind of money he’s dropping but also, we get the impression, because she feels herself in control of the situation, unworried about harm and disarmed by his charm. He’s funny, he’s nice, he pays, he has drugs; being rich, he’s not interested in painful realities; being poor, she could stand to do without them herself.

When Ivan proposes a regular arrangement, at a suitable price, Anora is fine with it, leading to lots of partying, goofy broken English-Russian banter, and inept sex, which Anora gets comfortable enough to help him improve. When it comes time for the kid to go back to his parents in Russia, Ivan proposes to evade it by marrying Anora.

Up till this, the arrangement has been all fun and flash, but when Ivan professes himself serious, as unserious as he’s shown himself to be, we can see the sadness lift from Anora’s smile — though we may also sense, even as Ivan and Anora are spinning out high on wedding vibes, that at some point the sad is coming back with interest.

Not to spoil too much, but the folks back home don’t approve, and send local flunkies to break it up — a nervous fixer, his dimwit muscle, and a quiet, attentive sidekick. Ivan flees, and Anora’s middle section becomes a shaggy-dog tour of south Brooklyn in which Anora fiercely fights the flunkies, deftly breaking the muscleman’s nose, and then has to accompany them as they trawl the boardwalk, billiard parlors, and bars for the runaway Ivan.

There ensue hijinks involving mild violence (smashed candy jars, a thwarted tow-away) and Anora’s incessant, pissed-off asides: e.g., after losing an argument as to whether to drive rather than walk five minutes to the next search location, quick cut, then Anora offscreen: “That was way fucking longer than five minutes!” (Maybe Billy Wilder wasn’t really the best example.) She trades similar barbs with the fixer and the muscle, but it’s the sidekick with his silence and furtive staring that really gets under her skin.

I won’t fully reveal the resolution — though skip this graf if you don’t want any hints — but I will say Anora fights for what she wants and, when she loses, lobs some firecrackers over the wall that don’t change the outcome but soothe her scoured pride. Also, as we may surmise by some of Baker’s very astute framing, the sidekick takes a bigger role than he seems at first to have. But don’t expect him and Anora to run off together, because she is done with anything like running off, and the ending has enough mystery in it that your own scoured heart will have to tell you whether that’s good or bad.

Mikey Madison as Anora is believable as a dancer, as a born Brooklynite, as a fighter (but I repeat myself), and as a woman in what she hopes is love. Also she’s frickin’ adorable, maybe not least when telling a tycoon to go fuck his mother. Mark Eydelshteyn as Ivan, a big hank of hair and hyperactivity, shows us why Anora would enjoy him and even mistake his weakness for something harmless. Yura Borisov as the watchful sidekick says barely anything for most of his screentime, but he and the writer/director/editor Baker conspire to fully earn his place by the end; his and Anora’s penultimate conversation (“‘Toosh’? Try figuring out English before attempting French, you dumb fuck”) is my favorite acting scene of the season.