Anora

Or: Beware Glass Slippers For They Will Cut Your Feet

Mikey Madison has, in her previous big-picture appearances, earned herself the less-than- flattering-but-too-good-to-pass-up nickname: The Girl Who Was Set, Repeatedly, On Fire. In those previous incarnations Madison’s characters were intoxicatingly scary, with all the iridescent gleam of an oil slick, ready to spark into all kinds of bad trouble, most times. And yet, there was something, beyond the victimhood or the villainy, that captured the attention, that made one wonder, what could that actor do with a real part.

Thank goodness then Sean Baker wrote, directed, and built this film on Madison’s prodigious talents. The eponymous “Ani” is a stripper from Brighton Beach working at a high end club, a profession which Baker and the movie are keen to settle immediately is work like any other, if that work is the world’s worst customer service job. Ani has her cigarette breaks, her battles with management, her foreshortened lunches, and still has to stroke egos and wrangle tips simile and smile and smile and then trudge back to her train-side shared apartment to start the game. One day is just like another, and every john is essentially the same.

That changes when she is called upon to cater to Vanya (Mark Eydelshteyn), a twenty one, ludicrously wealthy, Russian national in New York and in his life just to have a good time. Anora, despite all appearances, is a ludicrously funny film and most of that humor runs from just how dumb Vanya is. Eydelshteyn nails the puppyish thoughtlessness, the crazed antics (how many young men have done a backflip out of their own drawers, it seems universal and utterly original) and the sincere need (for drink, for games, for Ani) that is immediately supplanted by other passions. His Vanya is the very epitome of a spoiled, endearing boy who has done not one lick of good in his life, but not much harm either.

Shown his palatial home and carefree life Ani’s relationship with the fawning Vanya metamorphoses from escort, to fake girlfriend, to real girlfriend, to, courtesy of a Vegas Chapel, Lawfully Wedded Wife. Which is when the troubles start, for she now has to deal with the wrath of Vanya’s very scary family. Or rather with outsourced wrath of their less then scary goons: Toros (Karren Karagulian), Garnick (Vache Tovmasyan), and Igor (Yura Borisov), who have orders to get the marriage annulled, Vanya back to Russian, and Ani out of the picture. Good luck, Gentlemen, you’re going to need it.

Baker has two luminous qualities that he uses throughout Anora, always in different lights and touches. One of them is sex, or rather, ridiculous sex. Vanya and Ani’s practices of Carnal Embrace are always silly, un-titillating, and well, short. One of the most satisfying jolts of the film is a host of strippers abandoning their alarmed johns mid-lap-dance at the promise of more exciting fair.

This is not to say that sex itself is ridiculed; when Ani puts on a private floorshow for Vanya it is very much shown as a blend of artistry and athleticism, and there is a moment towards the end where the intercourse is very, very, incredibly, sad. Like the threats of Toros and Co.: it’s funny until it isn’t. And then it’s so dangerous you can’t help but start snorting under your breath again.

The other of Baker’s magic paintbrushes is a heightened sensitivity for faces. Sometimes in jarring closeups, sometimes just by the way its positioned, we are thrust into, or barely catch a calculating gaze, weighing the scene before us (when Vanya makes his ham-handed proposal, our eyes are fixed on Ani, taking in her Cinderella’s chance, while he is relegated to a pair of gesticulating hand, finger-gunning the way to matrimony). No one does this alchemy of gazes better that Borisov. Igor, dragged along by his bosses on an unfolding nightmare job, brings a different sort of humor to the movie, as he shifts from Ani’s captor to advocate, perpetually bemused and off kilter upon but never the less riveted by the proceedings. You can see it in the way he waffles an aluminum bat, or sneaks popcorn from a smashed machine, or tries to speak around a mouthful of burger. There is a charming, dangerous, magnetic quaintly that kept reminding me of another actor throughout the film … until I realized the actor I was thinking of was Mikey Maddison in her earlier unhinged incarnations. Will Igor meet a grizzly end from a flamethrower? Watch and find out!

And what of The Girl Set Repeatedly On Fire herself? Maddison gives Ani a jewel-tonged Brooklyn charm, a worldly weariness, and terrible hope that keeps cutting her deeper every time. Anora, the movie, sets out to frame its star in her best light, un-objectified but studiously lit (one of of those, breathtaking shots happens with Ani’s face illuminated in the dark club as she enters her private number into Vanya’s phone at their first meeting). But even without Baker’s studious collaboration Maddison would have carried the film handily. Her performance carries the iron of Ani and her glass, right in her bones, her self possession and her pride and the danger she knows she is constantly in, even at what should be her most secure and best cherished. But furious, fervent, surrounded by foes, or in her happiest moment we finally get to see Maddison truly blaze.