By M. Faust
Photo above Courtesy of Neon – © Neon

Sean Baker has been making movies (and short films and television episodes) for more than 20 years. For much of that time, at least since “Tangerine” (2015), he has been regarded in film circles as The Next Big Thing, a status he has resisted. 

Or at least so I assume: I would be very surprised if the success of his 2017 “The Florida Project,” about young children living in a motel in the shadow of Disney’s Magic Kingdom, did not bring him offers to work with bigger budgets and well-known actors. Instead he followed it with “Red Rocket” (2021), starring Simon Rex as a washed-up porn star forced back to his smalltown Texas home. Both the character and the movie make you want to take a long cleansing shower, though it is clearly exactly the movie Baker wanted to make. 

Any thought that Baker was moving away from the generous love of marginal characters that marked his previous films is put to rest with “Anora,” winner of the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival. At its best, its characters and plotting hum with a comic energy reminiscent of screwball comedy master Preston Sturges. 

If there’s any chance you might be offended by “Anora,” Baker is nice enough to make sure you realize it right at the beginning. The scene is the workplace of the title character, the model of a factory assembly line except that the product is sex, or at least a form of it: in a Brooklyn “gentleman’s club,” nearly-naked young women grind on the laps of men who pay heartily for the favor. 

Anora (Mikey Madison) — Ani to her friends — can’t have been working here any more than five years, as she’s only 23. But she’s an old pro at the job, understanding how to size up a new customer in a matter of seconds, figuring out how much he wants and what he’s likely to spend for it before phrasing her greeting. 

Along with her heavy Brooklyn accent and a propensity for F-bombs that would make the cast of “GoodFellas” blush, Ani knows some Russian, which makes her an asset in an area with so many emigres from that country. And it pays off big time when she catches the eye of Vanya (Mark Eydelshteyn), a goofy young Russian throwing around $100 bills like he can’t wait to get rid of them. At 21, he’s a lot closer to her age than most of her clients (she considers 40 “geriatric”), so when he suggests they meet up outside of the club, she agrees. 

One thing leads to another, and when they come home from a spur of the moment trip to Vegas, Ani has a 4 carat wedding ring on her finger, ready to live happily ever after. Unfortunately, Vanya’s family has other plans for their scion, who was supposed to be in the U.S. studying before joining the family business, and they don’t include her. 

That’s the point at which “Anora” really takes off. Terrified at the prospect of facing his folks, Vanya flees. It’s left to Ani, the family’s American majordomo Toros (Baker regular Karren Karagulian) and a pair of henchmen to find him, a search that drags through any number of real-life Brooklyn/Coney Island locations. 

We never learn what Vanya’s family business is — we assume it’s at least shady if not outright illegal, because how else do Russian oligarchs get so much money? Ani fights with Toros and his men even while she’s cooperating with them, but we never feel any real sense of danger to her. That may not be plausible, but it keeps the film frothy and funny.

I presume that while that Baker is obviously aware of the dangers facing people who sell sex for a living, he is consciously choosing not to define them by that, the way every other movie would. It’s a tactic that keeps the film from achieving much in the way of dramatic depth, though what it gains in sheer bravado more than makes up for it.