I returned from the cineplex having just watched Sean Baker’s Anora. After a brief delay in screenings at the theater following an unforeseen power outage which lasted a day, my appetite to watch the film only grew and I wondered if my expectations would’ve been exceeded at the first possible screening I caught.

But from the immediately striking first minute of the film panning within the Brooklyn strip club darkroom and into the close up view of Mikey Madison as the unassuming sex worker whose life we’ll follow from this point onwards, I knew this would be a heavy hitter of a character study. Nonchalantly servicing a barrage of older male customers relieving their libidinous frustrations in those cloistered stalls, Anora goes through men like disposable tissues until happening upon a precarious and oblivious man entering the establishment who is closer to her age. The son of an affluent and financially lucrative upper class Russian oligarch who is left abandoned to his whims, Ivan immediately brings out Anora’s interest who herself is Turkic and can communicate in Russian chances the luxuries offered through the man. Immediately extending exorbitant capital for an exclusive pact for the week outside of the strip club, Anora and Ivan go on a succession of expensive hook ups and their lust progresses into a spontaneous marriage in Las Vegas near the end of the momentary honeymoon.

But little do they know that Ivan’s caretaking secretary Toros acting on behalf of the Zakharov has caught wind of the legally precarious marriage. Potentially devastating to the oligarch parents of their newly married and unwatched spendthrift child in Russia, Toros and his bodyguards Igor and Vlad infiltrate the mansion apartment both Anora and Ivan are staying at with plans to immediately initiate a divorce. The escalation becomes destructive as Ivan flees from Toros’ bodyguards and Anora is held hostage, who constantly fights to keep the marriage intact.

Progressing into a brief city chase film for Ivan’s whereabouts and into a legal courtroom drama briefly, the tone reaches a pitch black conclusion following Ivan’s drunken and apathetic divorce. Pacing wise the slow-fast-slow progression of the three acts are remarkably handled by Baker who commendably handled the editing himself.
Even though the marketing of the film had to deal with the complicated task of advertising a very complex film on the aesthetic basis of its romance and sex primarily, Sean Baker delves into concepts as vast as the demarcation of values between love versus lust, the (un)authenticity of courtship and what validates the autonomy or legitimacy of romance in American society and counter to that the international perspective behind the son of a Russian oligarch marrying a sex worker in America and what that reveals about deviating from assimilation to the conservative etiquette and status quo, etc.

There is quite a lot of late stage capitalism observed in relation to the breakneck immediacy of Anora and Ivan’s dalliances and eventual marriage, where only through extreme measures of payment do they become compatible and even then fueled largely by cycles of drugs and casual rough intercourse. But the film doesn’t seem condemning or shameful on account of either side of the equation as these characters are both victims of their environment, upbringing and given circumstances. Anora is defined almost entirely by her engagement and livelihood in the commodification of sex as a business while Ivan is exemplary of upper class parental neglect and materialist privilege leading to this instance of him turning to the services of a prostitute in order to find gratification in the short term. For both these protagonists this is all they know and can get out of life. The Eastern European-American immigrant angle of the main character, even including Toros and his accomplices add a distinctive tenor to the film’s explorations of dangerous marriages and the unwanted reciprocations that result from them. The phenomena of such a marriage could’ve destroyed the reputation and longevity of the Zakharov oligarchy, so vigorous intervention of order from high above had to pry this Gen Z Romeo and Juliet apart from each other.
The interruption of Toros unable to finish a baptism ceremony as a priest in a Catholic monastery due to the hastened news of the marriage was a great inclusion for the character.

Even though this film is entrenched in the experience of generationally clashing dynamics felt between families of differing nationalities and beliefs around love and marriage in 21st century America, the dramatic arc of the narrative has timelessness equivocal to a Guy de Maupassant short story from the 19th century.

I earlier mentioned William Shakespeare with Romeo and Juliet yet Anora has elements of the playwright’s style that are better handled here than in most modernized adaptations done in earnest of his plays, at least on film. Most of the family dysfunction synonymous with Shakespeare’s history plays centered around the altercations of monarchs during instances of war, such as Richard II and Henry V amidst the backdrop of the Hundred Years War which tore all manner of their personal lives apart, including the romantic. Even the alternating dark comedy and high drama tones of the film are reminiscent of Shakespeare’s problem plays like Troilus and Cressida, which also had a doomed love affair coupled with international tension between the warring Trojans and Greeks.
With Baker framing this story around a not-so-worldly Uzbek-American prostitute being shamed and rejected by an upper class Russian family specifically during this still unfolding era of unrest and tension with the Ukrainian War between Russia and the US, I can’t help but wonder if Baker turned to the immortal tragedies of past dramatists as an inspiration point to transpose layers of subtext for what would await the doomed Anora.

This is a Juliet whose Romeo will never actively fight back against either his Capulet or Montague oppressors to save their romance, and who will likely continue partaking in adulterous debauchery as long as he is financially able and not in serious surveillance.

The ending is singlehandedly one of the most haunting and heartbreaking final scenes in any recent movie I’ve ever seen, an ending which is so dark that the credits don’t even play with any musical accompaniment.

After loudly throwing a temper tantrum where she screams rape repeatedly while being held down by Toros and Igor in the mansion apartment, and dismissively belittling Igor as a rapist just by his glances and unspecific but direct refutes to her condemnations following the officiated divorce and breakup, she completely goes against her words and her ethics at the offering of the discarded ring by Igor when parked outside her snowy apartment one last time. The mostly wordless and nearly dead silent exchanges between Mikey Madison and Yuri Borislav’s acting in the car is indescribably intense and the registers of blank confusion on Igor’s face as Anora proceeds to spontaneously initiate foreplay and intercourse is both a desperate cry for help and a tragic turn into irreversible regret.

The depiction of the rape before Anora completely breaks down sobbing in Igor’s arms has a melancholy and disturbing sensuality that would’ve been completely at home in a long lost Bernardo Bertolucci masterpiece. You get the impression that this girl is no longer redeemable and her integrity and worth have reached the lowest imaginable point, but as she silently exhumes from the forceful coercion and weeps into Igor’s shoulders her soul is now truly broken.

This film is one of those rare examples in narrative fiction cinema where the filmed intercourse doesn’t feel merely pornographic but purposefully integrated into the expository function of the respective narrative plot and story progression, showing how degrading, repetitious, shallow and meaningless the cycles of sex actually are for both Anora and Ivan as well as the colleagues in the strip club who evidently are “performing” to keep their job. Sean Baker distinguishes himself quite notably from the likes of Bertolucci and Nagisa Ōshima in that regard.

I also get quite a lot of Sidney Lumet influence in the syntax and style of the film interestingly enough, whether its the extensive on-location filming in New York and Brighton Breach, the depiction of the prostitutes’ dim livelihood (The Pawnbroker), the legal ramifications and ensuing court drama hastened by Toros on behalf of the Zakharovs (The Verdict) and the confined yet pressurized containment of Anora in the apartment by the bodyguards further emphasized by the mise-en-scene of the claustrophobic living room (the conference room in 12 Angry Men or the bank robbery in Dog Day Afternoon).

Mikey Madison too has both the understated restraint and unvarnished explosive vigor of a young Al Pacino at certain moments of the film, all the more complimented by her naturalist yet remarkably brave turn before the camera. I have never seen a young actress so daring and unhindered by the gaze of either the camera or the viewer and I’m excited to see her act in more films.
The ending alone has catapulted this film into the stratosphere of a potential classic for me.