"Anora" Review

 With the announcement of the 2025 Oscar nominees last week, thus begins the Oscars Death March, my annual slog attempting to see as many of the nominated films and performances as possible before the Oscars are handed out so I can determine whether the Academy got it right or not. (Last year's Death March recap & my Oscar votes are here.)

Having only seen two of the ten Best Picture contenders so far - Dune: Part 2 and The Substance - there's a lot to catch up with so tonight we kick the March off with Anora, nominated for six Oscars (Best Picture, Director, Original Screenplay, Actress, Supporting Actor, and Editing) and winner of the Palme d'Or at Cannes 2024.

Mikey Madison stars as Anora "Ani" Mikheeva, a stripper at a high-end NYC strip club. One night, because she can speak some Russian, she's tapped to entertain Ivan "Vanya" Zakharov (Mark Eydelshteyn), the spoiled brat son of a Russian oligarch. Liking what he's getting at the club, he asks if she does anything outside of work which leads her to visit Ivan's family mansion in Brooklyn where he pays her for sex.

After several visits he asks if he could rent her companionship for a full week, offering $10,000. She counters with $15,000 and the deal is sealed. (Time for some Pretty Woman hijinx, right?) She accompanies him and a couple of his buddies to Vegas for high roller partying.

Concerned that he's going to have to go back to Russia as his visa is running out (wait, people actually heed those?) he proposes to her so he can get a green card and she agrees. So off to a Vegas wedding chapel and then a shopping spree (not set to "Pretty Woman" lest people catch on) with a big rock ring. And they lived happily ever after. 

Psyche! No, what actually happens is word has made it back to his parents in Russia, so Toros (Karren Karagulian), an Armenian who is the family's man in town, is commanded to get to the bottom of the things and he dispatches Garnick (Vache Tovmasyan) and Igor (nominated Yura Borisov) to pay Ivan a visit. 

When they arrive, Ivan bolts the scene and Ani makes it very difficult for them to subdue her. When Toros arrives, he is horrified by the situation especially due to Ivan's parents being en route for a meeting at noon the next day expecting that the marriage be annulled by then. But they need Ivan present which means finding him, so they set off on a bonkers quest to find her wayward husband. 

While Anora is modestly entertaining overall, it is yet again another movie showered with praise when there is little substance to it, like, say, The Substance. The Palme d'Or is Cannes' Best Picture award and frankly I am mystified why such a thin movie was bestowed with the highest praise.

To cut to the core of the script's key deficiency, here is everything we learn about Ani in over two hours of movie:

• She's 23 years old.
• She lives with her sister.
• Her mother lives with "her man" in Miami.
  

That's it. Why is she a sex worker? Don't know. Why does she instantly fall for this scrawny twerp who would rather play videogames than boink the woman he's paid for and why does she believe this is a fairy tale romance destined to last forever? Ya got me. She has no agency and everything flows from other people's decisions. If Ivan hadn't asked her to turn extracurricular tricks, she never would've seen him again. If he didn't need a green card he never would've proposed and she's back giving lap dances and turning tricks.

Let's compare her to another famous movie hooker, Jamie Lee Curtis's Ophelia in Trading Places who delivers this monologue to Dan Aykroyd's Winthrop when she brings him home because he's homeless due to the plot:

Look, I'm 24 years old. I'm from a small, miserable, little mining town you probably never heard of. The only thing I got going for me in this whole big, wide world, is this body, this face, and [points to head] what I got up here. I don't do drugs. And I don't have a pimp. This place is a dump. But it's cheap, it's clean and it's all mine. I've saved 42 grand and it's in T-Bills earning interest. I figure I got three more years on my back. I'll have enough to retire on.

 There is more character detail in that paragraph than the entirety of Anora. We know where Ophelia is coming from, where she is, and where she plans to be eventually. 

Or let's look at Pretty Woman, which Anora clearly aspires to be a hard-R tribute to. I'm not going to lie, I had to refresh myself on the plot because it's been decades since I've seen it, but the romance between Richard Gere and Julia Roberts grew from each character's effects on each other beyond the initial transactional nature of their relationship. Also not going to lie when I say I want to visit the alternate universe where the original story, titled 3000 (for the number of dollars she got paid for the week), was made with Al Pacino and Ellen Barkin (reprising their Sea of Love team-up) and ended with her junkie hooker being sent back to the streets at the end. Bleak.

Quadruple-threat Sean Baker - nominated here for producing, directing, writing, and editing - brings the naturalistic, pseudo-documentary style with mostly unfamiliar casts here as he did in 2017's The Florida Project where only Willem Dafoe (who received an Oscar nomination) was a recognizable face. While Madison was in Scream V and Once Upon A Time...In Hollywood, I don't recall her and I never saw the FX series she was on for five seasons either. As for the rest of the cast, zip, zero, zilch. And that helps the situations go down because the lack of celebrity means you have no idea what's going to happen (presuming famous = plot armor).

Madison is appealing and spunky, but as noted has nothing to play but Ani's delusional fantasy of love. (And kudos for not being an actress who plays strippers as if they were Amish.) Eydelshteyn is OK as well, but his character is such a one-note sack of manure, you spend most of the time hoping his family tosses him out of their private jet over the Atlantic Ocean.

Borisov has the sleeper role as the quieter of the henchmen tasked with keeping Ani under control and as the only one who doesn't seem to be a total scumbag. His general decency leads to the final scene which almost burned the goodwill I'd extended this slight film.

Without spoiling the ending, Ani seems utterly incapable of relating to men any way but transactionally. Because Baker didn't bother to give her a backstory, we don't know if she ever had a boyfriend or why she views sex as just something men pay for and the only way she knows how to reciprocate kindness is with sex. She is a sad empty young woman, but because we're not supposed to judge anyone - especially the holy "sex workers" - we're expected to applaud her moxie and fighting spirit even though she's fighting for nothing worth fighting for.

Baker is known for his movies about the people on the fringes of acceptable society like the poor folks living in motels in Orlando in The Florida Project or the trans prostitute in Tangerine. But by making Ani off-limits from judgement and a cypher as an individual, then she is reduced to just a body to leer at, use and discard when finished with. This is the nasty secret that "sex-positive feminism" hides in encouraging women to exploit themselves on Only Fans or as strippers and prostitutes: Women are only worth what men are willing to pay them for their bodies. Who cares about their minds or souls? So doesn't that make feminism a scam to serve men?

If there's an upside to Anora's tale of sex work, Armenian goons serving Russian oligarchs, it's that it could've been a whole lot meaner and violent. But if it had been, the comedic moments would've clashed. It's all played as a goof here, but without characters we can even know, much less relate to, it's just a couple of hours looking, but not touching anything emotionally tangible.

Score: 7/10. Catch it on cable/streaming.