Welcome to the jungle. The lights are low, the drinks are expensive and the girls are for sale. Anora (Mikey Madison), who goes by Ani, is practised and obliging, a lap dancer who goes about her work like a professional. The club isn’t bad, the girls are mostly nice and they chat and laugh about their clients.
Along comes a Russian manchild Ivan (Mark Eidelstein), a pimped-up oligarch’s son who takes a shine to Ani, who speaks a little Russian. They like each other and haggle over how much she wants for a week as his exclusive girlfriend.
“I would have done it for $10,000,” she laughs after settling on more.
This has overtones of Pretty Woman three decades on but gritter and without the sentiment.
A smart young woman who lives next to a thundering railway track has a job that keeps her afloat. Suddenly, she is swept up in a new world in which everything is on offer. A huge house, domestic help, a private jet, and sex, lots of it.
Ivan is not a serious person as anyone can see but when he suggests flying to Las Vegas to get married, she does. Next, comes the four-carat ring and the Russian sable coat. Her lap-dancer friends congratulate her on winning the lottery and Ani cannot believe her luck.
Only then, his parents find out.
The arrival of the Russians flips the film’s mood into something shoutier and almost slapstick. His family wants the marriage annulled, their son brought to heel and they want her gone. It’s a test of a flimsy union that Ani dared to dream was real, at least for a minute.
This is perfect film festival fare that takes its audience to places that mainstream movies never go.
Writer and director Sean Baker, who won this year’s Palme D’Or, immerses himself in subcultures that are too much for most filmmakers. Red Rocket (2021) was about a washed-up porn star dating a very young girl; The Florida Project (2017) relished the unaware joy of children living in a seedy motel near Disneyland.
Baker finds value and bravery in the efforts of the poor. He works with fringe actors rather than big names, although Madison was the rebellious older daughter, Max, from the TV series Better Things.
Her astonishing performance is the brightness that guides a story that can be noisy but holds its nerve as a window into a world where real people live.
When one of the Russian henchmen, Igor (the marvellous Yuriy Borisov), declines to be baited by her, she turns up the heat and insults him for not trying to rape her. We don’t even hate her for this and neither does he.
“I’m not a rapist,” he says, and smiles.
Baker taps into the disempowering sadness of the dream of girls in the sex industry about marrying a rich man. He dresses it as a wild ride with a comic edge that never turns nasty. No one dies and it never aspires to explore the inner life of a sex worker. It’s a blackly comical romp about a Las Vegas marriage with a cast of sometimes cartoonish characters. Then it fleetingly rips open the awful tragedy of a woman whose life has been toyed with.
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What stays is the sweetness of the final scenes. There are no grand gestures and no lessons are learned but we care deeply for Anora, and for the watchful Igor whose gaze is on the woman behind the show.
Baker delivers a moment of tragic vulnerability that says it’s better to dream of kindness and respect than champagne and diamonds.
Anora screens again on November 2 at The Piccadilly as part of the Adelaide Film Festival, which continues until November 3.
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