'Anora' hits Israeli screens: A modern fairy tale with dark realities - opinion

Before prostitutes were called sex workers, there was a stereotype that they all had a heart of gold. But in Sean Baker’s Anora, which opens in Israel on December 12, the eponymous heroine, whose nickname is Ani (Mikey Madison) and who works giving lap dances in a Brighton Beach bar, doesn’t just have a golden heart. She glitters from head to toe, with red highlights in her long hair glinting as she sports shiny body-hugging dresses. 

Her eyes sparkle, too, sometimes because is stoned but mostly because her energy and optimism spill out. She reminded me of how writer Joan Didion described a woman convicted of killing her husband in the essay, “Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream,” as having “unremarkable good looks and remarkable high spirits.” 

Anora, which won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival this year, is the story of how Ani’s high spirits are dampened by a strange series of events that lead to her a deeper understanding of reality, and maybe a kind of redemption.

Many have described Anora as a modern screwball comedy or an updated Cinderella story, but while there were some laughs, I found it deeply sad. Ani is a little like one of the strippers in Tony Soprano’s club, who doesn’t understand how expendable she is. 

It opens with a pan across the club as girls straddle customers, as “Greatest Day” by Take That plays. She is one of the club’s highest earners, but when she returns to the Brooklyn apartment she shares with her sister on a chilly morning, she is too exhausted to pick up a quart of milk, and they bicker with no real glimmer of affection. 

A Brooklyn road movie

One night, Ani, whose parents are from Uzbekistan, is introduced by the club owner to Ivan (Mark Edelshteyn), a Russian big spender who speaks little English. He is even younger than her, handsome but wispy, with no interests other than sex, cocaine, and video games. 

She thinks she has him wrapped around her finger from the beginning. Soon, he sees her privately in a mansion overlooking Long Island Sound, filled with ugly art and expensive furniture that marks him as the scion of an oligarch.

When he offers her $15,000 to go with him and some friends to Las Vegas in his private jet, she couldn’t be happier, because it seems he is leading her to a path to a better life, one where she won’t have to hustle just to scrape by. When he asks her to marry him in Las Vegas, she naturally agrees, and when they get back to New York she quits her job, certain she has ascended to heights she only dreamed of.

The other girls wistfully wish her all the best, although one suggests she is being a fool. When Ivan’s father’s New York fixer, a Russian Orthodox priest named Toros (Karren Karagulian) learns of the marriage, he is shocked and upset that Ivan has wed a prostitute. He sends two thugs, Garnick (Vache Tovmasyan) and Igor (Yura Borisov), to get her to agree to an annulment ASAP.

THE BEST and funniest part of the movie gets going as these thugs arrive. Ivan slips out, and after Ani fights like hell, she eventually agrees to help them track him down. 

This part is like a road movie, although it all takes place in New York, mostly in Brooklyn. The whole movie is set around New Year’s and evokes the bone-chilling bleakness of a Northeastern winter. Toros frets over parking and they keep having to schlep across streets near the Coney Island boardwalk, where she thinks Ivan may be playing video games. The trek is hard for Ani, who teeters in her stilettos. 

Ani tries to convince herself that Ivan cares for her, despite how he ran away. You can see she is working hard to tell herself that he is something other than a spoiled brat. Ani goes through an extreme version of the journey of many women who have convinced themselves that this is the guy for them, only to have their fantasies collide with reality.

But the sadness in the movie comes from the fact that Ani has so little money and so few prospects that she lets herself get swept up into this flimsy excuse for a relationship. She turns off all her street smarts and common sense at the chance of a more secure life.

Mikey Madison, who was in Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood and who played Max on the series Better Things, has a likable quality that is essential to make you care about someone who at times seems so dim-witted. 

Without her presence and confidence, the movie wouldn’t work at all. Yura Borisov, who was in Compartment Number 6 and who seems to specialize in playing tough guys who are less vile than they appear at first, makes Igor the most interesting character in the movie, other than Ani.

Baker has made several films about sex workers; the best is The Florida Project, about a prostitute and her daughter who live in a motel near Disney World. Both that film and Anora deal with how the characters use their bodies and instincts to survive. While both films have laughs, the lighter moments in Anora make the harsher scenes especially sad. 

Anora opens in Israel on Thursday.