Anora
I really liked the TV show Better Things and it’s a little unsettling to see Mikey Madison, a kid in that show, play a stripper here. But she’s amazing; brash, funny, warm but also tragically naive and underneath it all quite vulnerable. It seems like she’s getting some attention from the awards people and it’s no surprise.
This feels like Sean Baker has taken his ‘screwball comedy in a seedy world’ formula and packaged it up for a wider audience. Tangerine1 is a wonderful film but it’s too prickly and off-the-wall to ever really pull in a cinema crowd. Anora goes for a broader comedic tone and generally has a more mainstream style, but not necessarily to its detriment.
Anora as a character is a little under-written, perhaps deliberately. It’s not clear who she is, what she wants in life, or what she has to lose in life. But again Mikey Madison manages to convey some of this where you least expect it. She’s always ready for a fight, always has a comeback and struggles to balance the transactional nature of sex-work with real romance. Through all these little moments you begin to build your own mental image of who she might be, and that might be enough.
The screenplay drags a little in the middle, and the second act is played for laughs (successfully, we all laughed) when perhaps it’s a little poor taste to do so given that she’s being attacked and tied up. At the same time it’s where we really start to get a sense that she’s not someone who goes down without a fight, but also seems to be blinkered to the reality of her situation. It just felt like the writing lost a bit of confidence at this point and the scene sort of flounders around.
The very end seems to have divided opinion but it worked for me. Yes it’s the classic ‘prostitute only knows how to respond to kindness with sex’ trope, but it occurred to me that Igor is also a gun for hire whose life isn’t that far removed from Anora’s.
I think Sean Baker has made some sacrifices here to get more people to watch Anora, but it holds true to his signature style and sensibility and if it means people get to see this funny script and wonderful lead performance then it was likely worth it - doubly so if they then go and seek out his other films.