Sean Baker's "Anora": You Can't Touch Her But She May Touch You

 Well, actually, you can under certain conditions touch Amora, the central figure in almost every scene of the 139-minute Baker film that brings joyous farce laced with societal critique. Just don’t lay hands on her in the dimly-lit confines of the Brighton Beach bar where she’s the belle of the exotic dancers, the uncrowned queen of a loosely unified female cadre whose actual trade is lap dancing.

The sad mopes grunt hands-free beneath these women, as everyone who knows a young hedgie is aware, because the first rule of such bars is you don’t touch the talent —not without going to a `private’ room—except to slide folding money into a g-string.

Baker’s movie, his eighth feature, brought him the Palme D’Or at Cannes this year (the first in a decade for a U.S. film) and opened to the best per-screen box office in five years. It shares with certain other of his films, perhaps most strongly “The Florida Project,” the quality of a fable. We watch our compromised heroine Anora struggle through various dire entrapments, wondering if she’s Cinderella or a hustler, and we come away hardly cleansed but somehow made more human. It’s as if on this boardwalk Adam and Eve look at each other with a first frisson of innocence—or ignorance?– but finally realize the entire world is one day going to be…one big titty bar? 

Given distributor Neon’s Oscar success with previous October releases that scored on the festival circuit, the film has barged into the middle of the seasonal awards conversation. Perhaps this moment in America is just right for embracing the darker house of a farce with attitude. At this moment when we may be sliding into political nightmare and the Mt. Rushmore of American manhood and late period capitalism is the monstrous law firm of   Weinstein (lust) Epstein (lust and wealth),  greed (Madoff), and [a/k/a Santa Monica Goebbels] Miller (casual fascism), You go to the movie house hoping to forget the election is days away, and Baker hits you with a fleeting shot of a Trump-lookalike  bar patron as the camera slides down a murky backroom where more involved commercial sex takes place.

 Our focus, early and late in Baker’s film, is on Mikey Madison’s title figure, who reminds one and all she goes by `Ani’ (and is effectively an orphan).  As multiple critics have written, Mikey Madison has become a continuing revelation, as recently when Tarantino used her to good if brief and gory advantage as a Manson girl in ”Once Upon A Time in Hollywood.”

 She grew a fan base of sorts in as the eldest and most challenging of Pamela Adlon’s three daughters in “Better Things”.  As a wised-up teen we pray will return the full force of her mom’s love, she alternately talks smack and shows tenderness. Baker fully bought into her character Amber in the 2022 iteration of the “Scream” stabfest series, and as the embodiment of the franchise’s creation myth, she makes both a good suspect and a fierce warrior versus various ghostfaces. A favorite scene comes at a species of frat party when an arrogant bro tries to haul Jenna Ortega’s Tara up to his room and her Amber steps in. “Sorry to interrupt,” she says before sending the dude to the floor howling in agony, “I’m just gonna tase you in the balls real quick.”

 My notion of Ani and her young lover’s story as a genesis chapter in their temporarily overlapping lives breaks down painfully in “Anora”'s concluding moments, moments both powerful and dispiriting enough to stoke Oscar talk.  Willowy Russian actor Mark Eydelshteyn’s  Ivan (self-dubbed Vanya in an attempt to be cool) could be posted next to the noun “brat” in anyone’s dictionary, as the young actor nimbly makes the stretch from half-charming in his jovial idiocy to…extremely disappointing on the romantic front. But it’s Ani we and Baker watch to see if their trophy wife, fairly-tale-for-suckers, can last.  

The reviewers who have seen in “Anora” a screwball comedy with earnest depths are not wrong. But if we’re going to make a case for the film’s greatness and as the apogee, for now, of Baker’s body of work, we have to acknowledge a steady whiff of tragedy that dogs a great many scenes and set pieces. The great British theater (and film) critic Keneth Tynan helped produce and celebrate iconic turn-of-the-century French farceur Georges Feydeau’s “A Flea in Her Ear” for England’s National Theater in the mid-Sixties, and quoted essayist Marcel Archad: “Feydeau’s plays have the consecutiveness, the force and the violence of tragedies. They have the sane ineluctable fatality. In tragedy, one is stifled with horror. In Feydeau, one is suffocated with laughter.”

 Anyone who’s had a wicked boss will recognize the pathos of Ani’s captors-turned-confederates--two Armenian Americans, Toros (Karren Karagulian) and Garnick (Vache Tovmasyan), and a Russian, Igor (Yura Borisov). The trio (and an equally quailing lawyer)  work in vassal-like fear of Ivan’s Russian-plutocrat parents as they’re tasked to annul Ani and Ivan’s abrupt Vegas marriage, capture the fleeing 21-year-old, and send away his inamorata. When we first see them, Bakers has noted, they represent "red flags" of threat.

“Your life will be destroyed,” warns Ivan’s terrifying  mother Galina, and we keep waiting for the crushing blows that Putin-era crime royalty might bring. It’s not until some deft underplaying as Galina and Ani come fully face to face that the movie’s moral vigor reaches folds into a climax that’s both comic and fulfilling. Still, the dark hues can’t be chased away, and those are the brushstrokes that stick. 

“Ani, make me proud,”  says the curiously clement club owner who first recruits Anora to take charge of Ivan as she dutifully becomes, in the lad’s muddled English, his “very horny girlfriend”. What she fights to accomplish over the next often-madcap hours may not have you quoting Ivan’s lust-struck exultation: “God bless America!”

 But it might make you, too, proud of Anora and what Madison, with Baker’s trust, has done in creating her.