Ani (Mikey Madison), an exotic dancer, punches the clock day in day out just like any working girl with rent to pay.
The audience shouldn’t presume that Ani is making the best of a bad situation. There’s no crying at strip club.
That’s the point of ANORA, the 2024 Palm d’or award-winning film from Sean Baker, who shoots subcultures without resorting to the clichés of half-baked realism.
Nobody is doing heroin, therefore nobody OD’s on heroin. Nobody loses her baby due to heroin.
Ani has a regular boss; it’s a workplace like any other with rules and regulations:
- You ask for the day off.
- You want the boss to straighten out a coworker that bugs you.
- Working stiff drudgery universal to the service industry.
- Annoying customers.
Her place of employment just happens to be a gentleman’s club.
- The deejay ignores your song list.
- Diamond (Lindsey Normington) accuses you of poaching a regular.
- On smoke breaks, you get high with your best girlfriend.
The filmmaker, for better or worse, normalizes, not glamorizes or sanitizes, work in the adult entertainment biz. More or less, it’s an honest living, blue collar survival.
Chatting with the clientele, Ani sounds like that friendly waitress at the diner you don’t forget to tip above the normal rate.
Raised by a single mom, she can also be tough, chewing out her employer for not offering health insurance, sick leave, and a 401K. Ani knows that this lifestyle will inevitably become less alluring when the years pile on, taking a toll on her body and soul proportional to future venues, dive bars or worse, far from the relative opulence of her current gig. For the time being, though, time is on her side and all things considered, life is pretty good:
No pimp named Upgrayedd threatening to cut your face with a straight edge. No night in jail after an undercover policeman flashes his badge while you’re haggling over price. No dead body in the dumpster.
ANORA is not your mother’s FLASHDANCE.
Alex (Jennifer Beals) dances at a club that indulges her CARRIE fixation and falling water until something better comes along. There is no welding on the side, no plans to audition for prestigious dance companies, no headbands and legwarmers.
ANORA is not your father’s SHOWGIRLS either.
No former child star fetish to indulge in. No highbrow stripping, stripping as high art; modern dance with Broadway revue-like production values, no camp.
ANORA is closer in spirit to your spinster aunt’s John Cassavetes worship. She remembers Cosmo, the strip club owner bitten by the creative bug, a self-styled impresario of burlesque played by Ben Gazzara in THE KILLING OF A CHINESE BOOKIE. That was so long ago, Cosmo’s impossible France that he designed himself.
A stage, in particular, the main stage featuring your star attraction is so twentieth century. It’s just wall less booths at HQ, short for Headquarters, a sort of nude office with a secretary pool. All the girls sit down. If you’re really good, like Ani, business is moved to a private office, and you sit down there, smiling.
Off hours, her upturned lips snap back into a straight like. Ani takes the subway, then walks the rest of the way home without ever considering a stop at the corner grocer.
Home is Brighton Beach, a section of Brooklyn nicknamed “Little Odessa” due to its Russian-speaking population. Ani crashes like Sleeping Beauty in a house without milk to her roommate’s dismay. There’s no crying at home.
If Ani Mikheeva has dreams – a husband, kids, a starter house – this unguarded face reveals nothing as she checks her phone on the front stoop while she smokes the first cigarette of another day before night.
“Few people surprise me,” Edward Lewis (Richard Gere), a leverage buyout executive with daddy issues, tells Vivian (Julia Roberts), a lady of the night, when he catches her flossing in Garry Marshall’s PRETTY WOMAN, the 1990 romantic comedy that regularly panned in some quarters for not being more Cassavetes-like, gritty and pragmatic.
Edward though, it was drugs, probably heroin. Ani brown bags it.
She stores her food in Tupperware. That’s the film’s dental floss moment. Nutrition is important to her. We glean the latent mom and wife in Ani, punctuating sentences with the jab of a pewter fork.
She wants to finish her lunch.
But Ani’s bilinguality is needed in the showroom, the boss insists. His schedule-maker besumedly observes: “That’s why you have Tupperware, it keeps things fresh.” She’s surprised. When Ani eventually leaves, it’s Sunny (Morgan Charlton) who can’t help but cry. It’s the Tupperware; the assistant manager is remembering the Tupperware. It’s the accumulation of little things, like dental floss and food storage that makes you love a person.
The Russian oligarch’s son laughs. A good laugh? A bad laugh? The decibels pumping out of HQ’s sound system and low-key lighting makes it hard to tell if the joviality is from a good place.
Vanya (Mark Eydelshetyn) is wholly unprepared, that’s for sure, to hear his native language reconstructed by a Brooklyn-accented young woman.
Ani is a professional. She flirts, nevertheless, because its’s money that matters. Ani doesn’t view the conspicuous mansion in Mill Basin through the lens of a faerie tale, a castle.
In PRETTY WOMAN, Vivian won’t let clients kiss her, a rule she states at the outset, knowing that such a move can lift the lid off the Pandora’s box of romantic love.
Similarly, Ani lives by the same conditions but never voices them aloud to Vanya. She recognizes the extended hookup for what it is, a job, with no expectations for the potentiality of arranged intimacy turning from studied lust to love gone unaware. There are no hurt feelings when Ani is treated less like a guest than hired escort at Vanya’s bacchanal. The filmmaker establishes a documentary-like realism before ANORA departs into fantasy.
If either person watched PRETTY WOMAN, the film Sean Baker holds up like a cracked mirror, it’s Vanya, who propositions Ani with a week of exclusivity.
Vanya seems to know that Edward gets the last word in as they negotiate the price of company with benefits, channeling Richard Gere. Who is the author of this faerie tale?
Does the Russian oligarch’s son fall in love with the working-class girl from Brooklyn?
In the midst of his marriage proposal, Vanya switches from English to Russian. “I think we would have a great time, even if I didn’t have money,” is hardly a declaration of love for the ages, but Toros (Karren Karagulian), Vanya’s handler from the Jim Jarmusch-inspired section of ANORA (the filmmaker references STRANGER THAN PARADISE and NIGHT ON EARTH), describes the Russian oligarch’s son as a boy.
Vanya is twenty-one going on twelve.
He’s too young and immature to introduce Ani to the finer things in life, like snails, polo, and opera.
Ani is the older woman. She’s twenty-three. In 2024, Ani doesn’t necessarily need a mentor, a Professor Higgins-type to correct her imperfect Russian, but she does want Vanya to put down his video game controller and look at her. Vanya Zakharov loves money, America, drugs, and maybe Ani – in that order.
The soundtrack suggests otherwise.
“Greatest Day”, a UK #1 for Take That, the Gary Barlow-led pop group from Manchester, distinguishes itself by being the lone song that doesn’t play in-frame.
“Greatest Day” could be born out of omniscience and picked up by a filmic frequency, a radio that plays the ether’s greatest hits. Or it could be a jam:
Ani’s jam, the song she listens to on her headphones while she traverses the city en route to a sad house that escaped gentrification, across a section of the bridge where the car chase scene in THE FRENCH CONNECTION was filmed.
But since Take That enjoyed more success in Europe, more likely, it’s Vanya’s jam. Take That scores their shotgun wedding in Vegas. “Greatest Day” is their de facto wedding song, which plays after the groom kisses the bride on cue. “Greatest Day”, as in Morris Day, acts as an answer song to “Kiss”, the signature song from PRETTY WOMAN, and potentially, Ani’s jam, suggestive of Prince Charming hijacking the faerie tale away from Cinderella, turning ANORA into an inverse of the Julia Roberts vehicle.
To remain in America, that was the plan: by means of a green card marriage to a U.S. citizen.
Vanya can’t let Galina Zakharova (Darla Ekamasova), his terrifying mother, see him cry at the annulment ceremony. That’s why he puts on sunglasses before Ani signs the document in a sad Vegas office near the airport. Igor (Yura Borasov), one of the Jim Jarmusch players, the Armenian handler’s enforcer, suggests that the Russian oligarch’s son apologize to Ani. Galina Zakharova is incensed, nearly traumatized at the idea that her son, somebody of his ilk would owe some “dirty hooker” anything more than the cashout money from a revoked green card.
For the first time, Ani sees herself through the eyes of people outside exotic dancing’s insular world and questions what it means to be a “working girl”. The debased young woman reappropriates the slur as part of a zinger about family dysfunctionality to hurt Galina Zakharova, then watches the slur’s original meaning boomerang and hurt her worse.
The snow looks so pretty outside Vanya’s panoramic window: slow snow moving over the Hudson River. Less so, these designing snowflakes, however, when you can feel its brittle cold coming through the tempered glass of an old car belonging to Igor’s grandfather.
“Damni tu Forza, O Cielo”, the aria from Verdi’s LA TRAVIATA blares out from limousine speakers in PRETTY WOMAN, as Edward climbs the fire escape stairs to Vivian’s apartment.
On the other side of a happy ending, either the car radio is broken, a likelihood, or silence can be the only music Ani understands, a score suitable for her return to Little Odessa and the small house. As a consolation prize, Igor returns the engagement ring to its rightful owner, claiming that he palmed it off Toros.
Ani moves over to the driver’s seat, still occupied.
As it turns out, the pretty woman had set the same boundaries as Vivian, no kissing on the lips. There is crying.
Fade out.
Fade in.
One day Anora will be in a pawn shop, getting an appraisal on the ring from a jeweler, when it’ll finally dawn on her: Love or no love, Vanya was in agreement with Igor; his ex-wife deserved an apology. Ani will tell the jeweler that she changed her mind about selling.
She’s going to keep the ring. Stick it to Galina Zakharova one last time.
The ring, with as many karats as Anora Mikheeva has fingers, will go into a box, a time capsule where it’ll remain until her dying day. Prince Charming may never arrive.
She just may end up in a dive bar, dancing for peanuts. One night, just an ordinary night, in between shows, she’ll hear the song, some silly love song from way back when. And smile, for the length of the song.
And then the song is over. And so is the smile.
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Great write-up, Cappie. I haven’t seen Anora, but this makes me want to.
I sometimes listen to The Big Picture, a podcast about movies, and they covered Anora recently and were raving about it. It will almost surely get Oscar consideration, so you’re out in front on this, cappie. I likely won’t see it, but your summary was interesting. The daughter from Better Things as a sex worker threw me off initially, but I’m told she’s perfect for the role.
You’ve captured the film really well. Nice job, Cappie!