For adults only: 'Anora'

 

For adults only: ‘Anora’

 

Anora

Dir: Sean Baker

Scr: Sean Baker

Pho: Drew Daniels

Ed: Sean Baker

Premiere: Oct. 18, 2024

139 min.

Sean Baker’s feature Anora is strictly for adults. Why? First, because it contains a lot of frankly sexual content. Secondly, and more important, it deals with grown-up reality, which will be much more a deal-breaker for potential viewers than the sex part.

Baker, best known for his The Florida Project (2017), makes movies about people dwelling at the edges of the American dream. Here he picks up the tale of a young stripper of the title, played most excellently by Mikey Madison. She works in New York, and because she can speak Russian, she is tapped to entertain Vanya, the wasted young son of a Russian oligarch.

The two get along, and soon Vanka is paying “Ani” for a week of pretending to be his girlfriend. Then he proposes marriage in Vegas. They get hitched . . . and soon the parents find out. It turns out that Vanya would like a green card, so that he doesn’t have to go home and work for his father. Vanya’s mother races to New York, insisting that the marriage be annulled.

Ani gets swept up in all this due to an ironic naivete that doesn’t travel well with the explicit sex work she specializes in. She is an expert at being desirable; marriage to a rich man could easily be seen as the ultimate goal of a woman in her profession. She gets what she dreamed of, but it quickly and shoddily falls apart. It’s only when the dreams are broken that we see begin to perceive Ani’s great and unexpected strengths.

This is a Cinderella story, albeit one that ends seemingly unhappily. It’s also a refutation of Pretty Woman, which I am always up for.

Whoever’s in power decided to not promote this film! Have you ever heard of it before today? I only saw it by sheer chance. The sexual content is almost all at the front of the movie, and it is so in your face that for a while I considered the idea that this was the wrong kind of film to watch. I can imagine it was a nightmare for marketers to try and think how to sell this film. But that’s because Baker tells real stories about believable people, interesting characters that go through life-changing experiences, for better and for worse.

So, if you are a mature and thoughtful adult, I highly recommend this comedy of manners for the 21^st century, which turns out far more poignantly than you might expect.