Anora: Love’s Labors

Baker’s films delight in traversing urban space (and nonspace)—the West Hollywood streets of Tangerine, the strip-mall sprawl of The Florida Project—and his previous New York excursions have gravitated to the city’s less touristic precincts: Chinatown sweatshops and Upper West Side tenements in Take Out; the storefronts and back rooms of the wholesale district in Prince of Broadway. Anora undertakes a largely off-the-beaten-path jaunt through the Russophone pockets of South Brooklyn. The Zakharov compound in Mill Basin was in fact once owned by a Russian billionaire’s ex-wife. The search for Ivan takes in several vivid Brighton Beach locations: a candy shop, a pool hall, and the oceanfront Tatiana Grill, which—enhancing the documentary textures—is populated with a bemused real-life clientele when Toros and company barge in. The timeless postcard vistas of the Coney Island boardwalk are especially melancholic in their offseason emptiness and the flat winter light, not to mention suggestive of the grayscale pall of innumerable 1970s NYC movies that share the gritty vigor of Anora.

It is not incidental that Anora is titled for a name that the heroine rejects, presumably for being a touch too exotic-sounding for an assimilated American. The power of names proves central to the meaning of the film. Not once in Anora does anyone utter the term that Baker used in his speech at the Cannes Film Festival, when he dedicated his Palme d’Or to “all sex workers, past, present, and future.” Ani is instead subjected to a gauntlet of epithets: escort, prostitute, whore, the Russian shlyukha. “She’s a fucking erotic dancer,” Ivan protests, a feeble attempt at chivalry in response to one of these slurs. The elder Zakharov, who proves to be a much smoother customer when he appears on the scene, opts for a flowery euphemism: “night butterfly.” Often Baker shows us Ani’s face as an insult is casually flung her way, registering both embarrassment and fury.

Inhabiting the most intricately drawn character in Baker’s filmography, Madison gives a performance at first most notable for its physicality: whether wearing almost nothing at the club or stalking through Brooklyn in her sable coat and high heels, Ani projects toughness and street savvy. But even more impressive, as the film progresses, is Madison’s emotional range, the way she conveys—subtly, wordlessly, and without a trace of sentimentality—the cracks in Ani’s armor. Ivan is not without his charms, and his lifestyle is an obvious lure, but Ani is surely too smart to believe that he is any kind of Prince Charming—or to fall for this man-child, who is not particularly skilled in bed (at least until she starts to coach him) and seems happiest glued to his video-game console. Still, Ani, who is in the business of selling fantasy, is not immune from buying into one herself. During the knockabout struggle with the Zakharovs’ goons, it is the confiscation of her four-carat wedding ring that provokes her fiercest resistance. Her impromptu marriage is worth fighting for, if not for love, then for what it represents, what it says about her place in the world.

How do you end a film that has engaged so frontally with fairy tale and romance—two forms in which endings very much matter? Pretty Woman (1990), one of Hollywood’s most conspicuous retellings of the Cinderella story, concludes by granting the ultimate prize of material comfort and class mobility to its streetwalker heroine. But Baker’s movies have always specifically recoiled at this naive, indeed obscene, version of the American dream. Any faint hope that Ani might cling to her marital status evaporates once the Zakharovs arrive and order everyone aboard their plane to Vegas for an emergency annulment. As Ivan’s mother makes threateningly clear, Ani has zero say in the matter. She will accept her “green-card fee” of $10,000 (less than her compensation for the week with Ivan), and as far as they are concerned, never be heard from or thought of again.