By Erica Abeel

In Anora, director Sean Baker brilliantly sustains a hybrid tone, weaving together LOL comedy, sadness, and rage.

Anora, directed by Sean Baker. Screening begins on October 25 at Coolidge Corner Theatre, the Alamo Drafthouse Boston, and AMC Theatres.

Mark Eydelshteyn and Mikey Madison in a scene from Anora.

With certain films you need only hear about the premise or an inspired bit of casting and you’re on board.  I knew I had to see Ruben Ostlund’s Triangle of Sadness the moment I heard Woody Harrelson would play the alcoholic Marxist captain of a luxury cruise.  Similarly, director Sean Baker had me from the start with the premise of his latest film, Anora: son of Russian oligarch falls for American sex worker.

Baker more than delivers with a rollicking, propulsive journey that’s both funny and terribly sad.  (Anora snagged the Palme d’Or at this year’s Cannes along with a berth at the impeccably curated New York Film Festival.)

Baker (best known for The Florida Project) has been tagged the poet laureate of sex workers, hustlers, trans people.  The marginalized and reviled, the person you want to avoid on the subway, folks more or less invisible to the donor class — these are Baker’s peeps.  And he films them with the panache that a bygone Hollwood might pull out for stars clinking glasses in a penthouse, generally on a budget below sea level.

Baker’s breakout film Tangerine (shot with three iPhones) explored the dramas of a transgender sex worker.  The Florida Project follows the pre-teen daughter of a strip dancer who makes rent by turning tricks in a seedy motel bordering Disneyworld.  I thought Baker’s 2021 Red Rocket a misfire, its washed up porn star just too gross.  But to its credit, the New York Film Fest included the film, maybe in the spirit of supporting  the lesser work of a major talent like Baker.

In Anora, Mikey Madison is an erotic dancer slash escort in a New York strip club.  Anora (she prefers Ani) is good at what she does and is first seen working the club, hair threaded with sparkle, introducing herself and warming up the comically sheepish customers, coming on like a hostess breaking the ice at any social gathering.  But a windfall waits in the wings.  Turns out there’s a young Russian high roller with an entourage who’s seeking a girl who speaks the mother tongue.  Ani, with her Uzbek roots, is happy to oblige.

The dude is Ivan, or Vanya (Mark Eydelshteyn), a handsome, twenty-ish goofball with the gangly body of a teen, son of a Russian oligarch.  Ostensibly in the States to study, Vanya mainly plays shooter video games and spends his dad’s money hitting strip joints and throwing boisterous parties with his homies in a lavish taste-free spread in Brighton Beach with security guards.  The kid immediately sparks with smart, no-nonsense Ani and ends up purchasing a week of exclusive “girlfriend” services for $15,000.  There follows a drug-infused bacchanal that morphs from the transactional into something resembling love.  The party moves on to Vegas where a smitten Vanya proposes to Ani and they marry in a hokey but legit chapel.

Anora is no Pretty Woman.  It all comes crashing down the moment Vanya’s parents (especially Madam Oligarch) discover their boy has married a prostitute.  The family dispatches three goons to his Brighton Beach spread to force the couple to get the marriage annulled.  Here Anora reaches a literally hysterical pitch – and no shortage of violence — as Ani puts up a ferocious fight to preserve her status as Vanya’s wife.  I won’t reveal Vanya’s response to the crisis except to say he fails to rise to the occasion.

The romance is doomed from the start, of course, and you watch Ani’s fairytale unravel as if witnessing a slo-mo armageddon – all while wondering how Baker is going to land this baby.  Ani maintains our sympathy throughout even though it’s clear during their “courtship” that Vanya’s a post-adolescent horndog hooked on video shooter games (during sex he prefers to be a bottom the better to keep playing).  On some level Ani knows her new husband is a deadbeat, but given the options in her world Vanya at least offers an escape from her job, a life-style upgrade, and a puppy-ish love that feels enticingly real.

The film slackens slightly in Act 3, but never mind: Baker has beguiled you into investing in Ani’s story.  It gradually becomes apparent that the bad guys are not the oligarch’s toughs.  In effect, they and Ani are all pawns moved about by the big kahuna and his wife in Russia, intent on shoehorning their knuckle-head son into the family biz.  Sean Baker is always working the class angle and the alliances in Anora naturally flow from that.  “Thank you for making my last trip to America so fun,” Vanya says.  “You’re a pathetic motherfucker,” Ani replies.  At the screening I attended the audience cheered.

So much else to love in this film, including the way it’s paced.  Act 2 powers by as the couple becomes infatuated amidst a collage of wild parties that appear filmed in a single take.  Baker edits his own films, I’m told, and he notches scenes seamlessly together with a hand-held energy as if his camera were dancing the story.  The initial rush makes the andante pace toward the end all the more poignant.

“Mumblecore” always seemed to me an indie film affectation.  Anora, on the other hand, traffics in the mangled English of Russian-speakers in a way that’s organic to the story.  Not only is the debased language in Anora extremely funny in an art form that traditionally relies on dialog – it semi-explains the lack of communication that feeds Ani’s illusions, as well as reflecting the chasm between her hardscrabble world and Vanya’s grotesque wealth.  Baker excels at finding spot-on locations: the frigid Coney Island boardwalk in winter; Vanya’s sterile, glassy flat; and, my fave, Ani’s detached brick house with a flight of stairs from the sidewalk and view from her bedroom of the elevated train rumbling by.

With his trademark humanism, Baker offers the work of Ani and her colleagues a legitimacy you’d be hard put to discover elsewhere.  One scene finds Vanya gawking like a kid in a candy shop as Ani performs erotic gyrations on the floor of his flat wearing not much more than a thong.  Baker shoots such sequences with seriousness and respect, treating erotic dancing almost as an art form.  In this film salaciousness is simply part of the human repertoire, generating its own line of work, and not one to be dismissed.

Mikey Madison’s doughty heroine anchors the film and will surely inspire Oscar talk; casting the talented Mark Edelshteyn as Vanya was a stroke of genius.  In Anora Baker brilliantly sustains a hybrid tone, weaving together LOL comedy, sadness, and rage.

Erica Abeel is a novelist, critic, and former professor at CUNY.  Among her novels are Wild Girls, named a Notable Book by Oprah Magazine and now available on Audible; and The Commune, a comic satire on the launch of Second Wave Feminism that Kirkus called “a joyous literary romp with hidden depth.”  Her forthcoming novel re-imagines characters from Ingmar Bergman’s Smiles of a Summer Night.