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A Modern Masterpiece — Anora (Vancouver International Film Festival 2024)

Elevation Pictures

Every film festival has a hot ticket. A tiny, packed out theatre abuzz with an energy akin to an early to mid-2000s sweatbox gig featuring a band your mate confidently tells you will be the next big thing. Everyone knows they are there for something special and pray it lives up to their expectations. At VIFF 2024, that something special is Palme d’Or winner Anora, a romantic-comedy-drama that not only meets expectations, but lands far beyond them, achieving a payoff on par with the ill-gotten gains of any post-Soviet oligarch.

With Tangerine (2015) and The Florida Project (2017) in his locker, writer-director Sean Baker has long threatened a masterpiece. Anora is the moment that bark became a lethal bite, as Baker returns to the American underbelly for another brutally frank examination of modern sex work. While The Florida Project and its pandemic-era follow up Red Rocket (2021) maintained a surreal, stripped back vibe, Anora goes large, hard, and fast, dropping us straight into the New York City strip club scene. There, we meet Anora (Mikey Madison), whose capacity for the Russian language leads her to Ivan (Mark Eydelshteyn), the playboy son of a billionaire and apparently the ideal client, as within weeks the pair are married in Vegas and shacked up in Ivan’s mansion. Naturally, when Ivan’s parents find out he’s married a stripper, all bets are off.

Rarely does a tragicomedy live up to its billing with such ease and consistency. Anora is deliberately hilarious yet remains tethered to the deeply sinister reality that a billionaire’s whim is another person’s whole life. For us normies, this is a sideshow, a collision of two worlds we’ll never know, lampooned by waves of physical and deadpan comedy, made all the more impressive by its primarily Russian delivery. Baker’s witty dialogue goes harder than a 3-carat diamond, polished by an array of committed and self-aware performances. The trio of hired goons sent to handle Anora flirt with three-stooges territory, but wisely resist crossing the point of no return. Karren Karagulian, Vache Tovmasyan, and Yura Borisov all play it straight when it really matters, while Eydelshteyn’s man-child remains hopelessly appealing despite being completely out of touch with reality.

At the centre of everything is Mikey Madison. Having been set ablaze to conclude both Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood and the recent Scream legacyquel, Madison is once again absolutely lit as Anora, a Brooklyn stripper and prostitute with a complicated, intertwined view of love and trading up. Money and sex may be the baseline for the character, but the writing and Madison’s stellar performance elevate Anora to a peak Baker’s previous sex worker characters had yet to scale. A fixture of almost every frame, Madison rides her focal point status with an undying charisma that carries the film to its devastating, yet fully earned conclusion. When she and Baker land the plane, they do so with a cold, hard reality that lingers long after the cut to black. Few would have expected a turn so impactful at this stage in her career, but this is the type of performance that can end up running away with the awards slate. Should Madison have the Best Actress statuette in her hand come March 2nd, no one would be surprised.

The same goes for Baker, who will rightfully have an eye on Best Director and Best Original Screenplay. Though the awards themselves do not matter, the fact that he is now firmly in that pantheon is testament not only to his raw talent, but to his uncompromising approach to filmmaking and continued determination to humanise sex workers. Anora is Sean Baker levelling up while forcing the world to sit up and take notice. It also just happens to be one of the best films of the year.

Anora played at VIFF 2024 and will play at LFF 2024 on October 11/15/20. It will be released in UK cinemas on November 1