Leave it to one of our best filmmakers – Sean Baker – to take a flimsy “Pretty Woman” romcom conceit and turn it inside out and upside down so he can create again something wild, something daring and something absolutely ingenious.
It is one of this week’s two big theatrical film openings that seem likely to maneuver their way into the year-end awards picture.
It’s no surprise given the resume of this acutely observant filmmaker, the inspired indie darling who gave us “Tangerine,” “The Florida Project” and “Red Rocket.” The Cannes Film Festival award winner (for this film) carries on his tradition of accurately raising the voices of characters often shunned by or stereotyped by Hollywood and our culture – those who hold on to society’s frayed fringes, from the impoverished to the sex workers.
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In this sexy screwball comedy that possesses both a heart and a soul, a feisty Brooklyn erotic dancer/sex worker with a fiery demeanor named Ani, short for Anora, gets whisked away in 1974 from a gentlemen’s club where she dances and strips for a living. Her “Prince Charming” is a real piece of work: a rich, carefree and reckless son (Mark Eydelshteyn) of a Russian oligarch.
After a sexy dance Anora and Ivan are partying hard and having sex like two Miami beach spring breakers. They spend a whirlwind seven days together, paid for by Ivan, of course. An impromptu trip to Las Vegas lends itself to a pop-up, no-prenup wedding, a frenzied union that doesn’t sit so well with Ivan’s image-conscious parents in Russia.
So it’s up to family clean-up guy Toros (Karren Karagulian) to solve this head-achy American problem and put asunder the off-the-couch/off-the-cuff marriage. He and two “muscle” guys – Garnick (Vache Tovmasyan) and Igor (Yura Borisov, in a performance that never misses a beat) – break into the sprawler of a multi-level mansion where the video-game-playing Ivan has been roosting, and doing nothing more than games and drugs. Anora, though, is no wallflower, no milquetoast and fights back while Ivan flees the scene.
The norm for most narratives of this sort would propel the story into dark and violent terrain. Baker avoids those cliches, and the finger-wagging moralizing. While the threat of violence hums in the electrified background he so richly creates, he metes out the threats only when warranted, staying true to the characters he’s imagined.
What that does is turn “Anora” into the equivalent of a hot stick of lit dynamite that gets tossed up on the screen, matching the explosive nature of its lead character and star Madison – a frontrunner for an Oscar.
Throughout, Baker’s maverick moviemaking breaks the mold right off the static romcom and joyously alludes to the visual style and narrative snap of late ‘70s films. To that point, the film is seamlessly edited, also by Baker. (The killer soundtrack only enhances the mood.)
“Anora” takes audiences on one wild ride with Baker maintaining a firm but relaxed grip on the wheel. He’s a savvy filmmaker, well aware when to apply the brakes and slow the freneticism down. Nowhere is that more beautifully realized than in “Anora’s” final perfect scene: one filled with so much ache and need for connection. It’s a beautiful sequence that no one could do better than Baker and his two actors, Madison and Borisov.
Contact Randy Myers at soitsrandy@gmail.com.
‘ANORA’
4 stars out 4
Rated: R (sexual content, nudity, language, nudity)
Starring: Mikey Madison, Mark Eydelshteyn, Yura Borisov, Karren Karagulian, Vache Tovmasyan, Aleksei Serebryakov
Director: Sean Baker
Running time: 2 hours, 19 minutes
When & where: Opens in theaters Oct. 25