The Palme D’Or winner’s torrential, jaunty pace belies a bleak portrayal of sex work under a setting American sun.
The post-2010 cultural environment has posed something of an unprecedented conundrum for filmmakers of the social realist variety. With tech’s digital deluge emerging as perhaps the defining feature of the last 15 years, our increasingly frictionless and internet-addled society has left little in the way of aesthetic inspiration for auteurs hoping to capture the essence of an “end of history” west. Tellingly, and despite its looming omnipresence, the smartphone has struggled to find any semblance of grace as a thematic focal point on the silver screen.
So too has the media borne of its message – texts, social media, and “content” alike continue to evoke a reflexive groan in both the art house and avant-garde. Woe be, then, the filmmaker who dares try to capture an honest portrait of America in all its contemporary, decadent glory.
Recently screened at the Hamptons International Film Festival, Sean Baker’s Anora – the latest entry into his compendium of masterly tales of the sex trade – proves that the tenor of the times continues to be best interrogated at the level of the most stigmatized and hard-done among us. It’s no coincidence that other successful editions of this Cassavetes-inflected genre – the Safdie brothers’ Heaven Knows What and Good Time; Eliza Hitman’s Beach Rats; even Janicza Bravo’s Zola – seem to hew more or less to this raw, unflinching shape. All four share a primacy of the corporeal, in all its decaying, consumptive, and pulsating imagery, grounding audiences back into a world where the grotesque nature of our synthetic abstractions cannot be uncoupled from the ways in which the very subjects of that imagery have festered within the confines of our American spectacle. Vapes and phones as epiphenomenal, human beings as a priori.
Mikey Madison’s titular Anora, known as Ani to her coworkers at a Manhattan strip club, is an inspired embodiment of these ideas, elevating some of Baker’s most enduring themes through a raw and unyielding performance – it’s immediately clear why the filmmaker wrote the role with the actress in mind. Madison oscillates brilliantly between the erotically insouciant and the hopelessly mercurial – bending the narrative to the will of Ani’s oft-calculated, knowing pathos. Embossed in the glitter of her makeup is a nod to both an ingenue out of her league and a veteran of a game that rewards raw, transactional cynicism – we can’t quite give up the notion that Ani straddles each of these states despite her best attempts to convince us otherwise. That Madison’s name will resound throughout awards season is virtually assured.
Baker is keen to thrust us right into the neon fray, as we learn that Ani is a leading lady at HQ, the club where she plies her trade with aplomb before retiring to the spartan comforts of a tattered outer borough pre-war. It’s not until one night when HQ’s manager delivers Ani to Ivan Zakharov (Mark Eydelshteyn), a betabled young Russian VIP, that the film picks up its febrile pace. Ivan’s English is lacking, but his penchant for ostentatiousness is not – Ani makes sure the night doesn’t end without her number in his phone. Her instincts prove correct when making a house call to Ivan the next day, arriving at a Brighton Beach mansion boasting amenities and gleaming surfaces abound.
What’s more, Ivan is the son of an oligarch and looking for the girlfriend experience – who better to provide than the Russian-American Ani. All of this is gleaned within the first hours of her arrival, and mere minutes after Ivan has wiggled his way to an expensive premature orgasm. The eagerness is endearing, and Ani can’t help but be charmed by her heedless and impulsive suitor as the following days see him lavish her with oligarchic largesse.
A bender for the ages assures that the acceleration of their bond continues apace, racing to its inevitable culmination in the form of a shot-gun Las Vegas wedding. Here the film is literal but nonetheless compelling, the Russian-American union a spiritually bereft intertwining, drunkenly consecrated at the altar of consumerism and opulence. The nuptial’s desert environs portend a future for Ani that unfurls like a mirage – just within reach, hyperreal, but never actually there – as the film’s second act hardly indulges in a breath before Ivan’s handlers and parents intervene to great tragicomic effect.
The film marks a noted turn for Baker, as he eschews the warm palette of Tangerine and The Florida Project for the ashen, wintry skies of Anora. The biting climate feels appropriate – Ani can’t seem to escape the fetters of her chosen line of work even after she’s briefly liberated from its grasp – throughout the film she finds herself prostrate before or bound to a man’s lap regardless of her material circumstance. Drew Daniels’ photography underscores this point, where the colors at play allude to sex work’s faustian bargain. The interior scenes are an abundance of lush neon, there’s almost a sense of salvation in the pink and purple hues, particularly in contrast to an exterior world of clinical, raggedy grays.
But the latter seeps in gradually to occlude the former, a vivid attestation to a society subordinate to the interests of a billionaire class in the late stages of spiritual decay (we learn that one of Ivan’s handlers is an Orthodox priest when he abandons a baptism upon learning of the young couple’s elopement).
This is the film’s ultimate indictment of our modern condition, and a logical critical evolution of Baker’s humanizing portraits of American sex work. Where class concerns once lingered on the periphery, they now take center stage in a full throated confrontation. Anora suggests that if the stigma of the profession remains one of its defining features, it can only do so against the backdrop of a culture that is totally complicit in preserving the very contradictions that render such privation possible. The audience then, won’t be surprised to learn that restrained allusions to The Great Gatsby are manifold throughout the film, and perhaps most starkly presented in the young Russian’s waterfront mansion.
In one of its few contemplative moments, another rote session in the sheets is foregrounded before the bedroom’s expansive littoral vista. Upon closer inspection, Nick Carraway’s green light has been replaced by a barren landscape of aspirational yet faltering structures that seem to gesture towards a waning American horizon. This is Sean Baker’s darkest study yet.