Normally, I go to see the big new release on the weekends, but it turns out my girlfriend wants to see Red One (and Wicked and Moana 2), so that means this weekend is about catching up on stuff I missed out for one reason or another before. First up: The Florida Project writer/director Sean Baker’s latest, Anora. I had seen the trailer a couple times before other movies, and while it didn’t exactly leave a lot to the imagination as to the general plot of the movie, that didn’t mean I would have a pleasant time seeing the movie when I finally got around to it.
Oh, and I also had the whole screening room to myself. That sort of thing doesn’t generally happen on an opening weekend, even for box office flops.
Anora “Ani” Mikheeva (Mikey Madison) is an exotic dancer at a higher-end, New York City-area strip club. She’s somewhat fluent in Russian, so one night she’s asked to see to a young Russian man, one Vanya Zakharov (Mark Eydelshteyn), and Vanya is friendly, up for just about anything, and incredibly wealthy. Taking a shine to Ani, Vanya asks Ani to spend more and more time with him, paying her well for the opportunity. Finally, after paying her for a full week, the pair go to Las Vegas and, on a spur of the moment decision, decide to get married.
There’s just one small problem: Vanya didn’t exactly tell his parents, and they actually control all his money. Additionally, he didn’t tell Ani that the house they’re living in isn’t his. As it is, when his parents do get wind of the problem, they dispatch their agent Toros (Karren Karagulian), and Toros sends ahead his brother Garnick (Vache Tovmasyan) and another employee Igor (Yura Borisov) to retain the married couple until Vanya’s parents can arrive to get the marriage annulled. There’s just one small problem for Toros and Company: they never dealt with a woman like Ani before. She may not get the marriage she wants out of all this, but she will not let make it easy on these guys.
What makes this movie work, and it works great, is Madison’s central performance as Ani. Ani is smart, resourceful, and in many ways, tough as nails. She’s not exactly in a winning position as Vanya’s parents, particularly his very formidable mother (Darya Ekamasova), have a lot more money and power than she does, and there’s not much she can do about anything here but fight back with everything she has, and in the grand scheme of things, she doesn’t have much. As it is, Baker does have a knack for showing the lives of people who don’t have much but do what they can to retain their dignity in bad circumstances, and Madison’s turn here shows a woman who is not going to make things easy for anyone who stands in her way, even if they are inevitably going to win in the end.
That is not to say Ani is completely in the right here. She doesn’t recognize how immature her new husband is, but at the same time, Toros and his two sidekicks aren’t really criminals or anything, so they don’t really know what to do here either. I would actually give Baker credit here that he doesn’t make Toros, Garnick, or Igor into outright villains. These are guys doing the best they can with the crappy job of trying to keep Vanya under some level of control. Igor in particular turns out to be something of a decent human being even if his initial attempts to keep Ani under some level of control goes too far. If anything, Ani, Igor, and the brothers do have one thing in common: they’re basically just people that get in the way of wealthy people who don’t seem to understand or care what they do to others. It’s all just a question of whether or not Ani can get anything out of her situation, and the answer to that question came from one of the best performances I have seen in 2024.
Grade: A
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