It’s No Wonder That Cannes Fell for Anora

Sean Baker’s Anora, which won the Palme d’Or at Cannes on Saturday, is a movie about the way people look at each other, though it may not seem that way on the surface. It follows an eventful few weeks in the life of a stripper who marries the young son of a zillionaire Russian oligarch, and it has an infectious, freewheeling energy that feels like a high-concept comedy that’s gone wonderfully off the rails. It could be 21st century screwball: At the post-awards press conference, Jury president Greta Gerwig said the picture reminded her of the “classic structures of Ernst Lubitsch or Howard Hawks”. There’s certainly some of that, but there’s also a growing network of glances throughout Anora that places it in another tradition. It’s a film about exploitation and labor.

When Ani (Mikey Madison) first meets Ivan (Mark Eidelstein), he’s a callow kid throwing money around New York’s HQ Gentlemen’s Club and asking for a private dancer who knows Russian. Ani, who doesn’t like to speak the Russian she learned from talking to her immigrant grandmother in Brighton Beach, goes to his side and finds herself charmed by his vivaciousness (and, yes, his money). “This is not allowed, but I like you,” she says, and takes her thong off while gyrating on his lap. He yells, “God bless America!” She pops her bubblegum. We half-expect the Star-Spangled Banner to start playing.

Wisely, Baker has already spent some time showing us the workings of this club and the many different clients who come here: the old married guys, the awkward young guys, the ones who try to make conversation, the ones who remind the dancers of Jeffrey Dahmer. There’s a lived-in authenticity to the setting that clearly comes from extensive research. “You’re gonna be hard fucking pressed to find another movie where they gave real strippers that many jobs,” co-star Lindsay Normington told my colleague Rachel Handler recently in this insightful interview with several of the film’s supporting performers. We see the ways that these women — always exceedingly polite and accommodating, able to put their clients at ease — interact with one another, their moments of quiet solidarity as well as their occasional rivalries. (One stripper gets on Ani’s case about having danced for one of her regular clients.) And so, we understand that Ivan’s youth and energy, as well as his willingness to spend freely, might stand out.

Soon, Ivan is asking Ani to spend time with him outside the club (for a fee, of course) at his absurdly huge compound, at his parties, at his getaways. There are private planes and limos and cocaine and fireworks and dancing and morning-after IV drips; Baker charges through these scenes in an almost hallucinatory frenzy, sweeping us along the way that Ani herself has been swept along. So that when Ivan suggests they get married during a last-second jaunt to Vegas, we want it to be a dream come true, not the start of a nightmare. The hesitation on Madison’s face in this moment, even as Ani finally says yes, conveys layers of confusion and hope.

The truth is that Ani has more in common with the human machinery around Ivan: the cleaners who come to vacuum his rugs and make his bed and tidy his post-party messes, as well as the Vegas hotel maître d who has to kick out the guests who were staying in the room Ivan decided he wanted at the last second. Ani might think she’s crossed over to the other side — she tries not to look at these other workers — but it’s pretty clear that the rest of the world doesn’t see her that way. Sure enough, word finally comes to the family’s minions: “A scheming prostitute married Ivan to cheat him and his family out of their money.”

We spend much of Anora with an ever-growing hole in the pit of our stomachs, waiting for the inevitable. And the men who come to put an end to this marriage fit the stereotype of the murderous goons we know and love and fear from many genre movies. There’s Toros (Karren Karagulian), an Armenian priest who works as the eyes and ears of Ivan’s parents in New York, the burly, bearded Garnick (Vache Tovmasyan), and the sullen, watchful Igor (Yuriy Borisov). But Baker, a humanist at heart, understands that they too are workers, just trying to get through their day and not get fired. Toros is already in deep shit with the big boss for letting the princeling marry a sex worker.

That’s when the magic of Anora truly kicks in, as things spin out of control and the picture expands in unorthodox ways. Baker’s work always has an improvisatory quality, though I suspect this is largely an illusion. The films resist the structures imposed on them, much like their characters. A scene that might occupy a few choice minutes in a typical movie might here expand to 20 minutes. A moment of tension might get unexpectedly defused, while a throwaway exchange becomes an extended screaming match. There are wild moments in Anora, as there are in all the director’s films, but they don’t feel like calculated escalations — they feel like real life letting itself in through the door and upending the narrative décor.

But the danger never quite dissipates, and the threat of violence still hovers over Anora. Baker never loses sight of the fact that all these people are, in the end, disposable to those with power and money. They each serve a purpose and can be discarded at whim. That too adds to the frenetic energy of the film: For all its charm, Anora is a movie in which just about everybody’s fighting for survival, and they only ever manage to succeed when they start working together. Baker has made a number of pictures about sex workers, and he dedicated his award at Cannes to them. Why is he so fascinated with such settings and characters? I suspect it’s because their world crystallizes the transactional nature of so much of our lives.