Sean Baker is back with another at life through the eyes of a sex worker.
In one of the most intense movie theater experiences, we could hear the old car’s motor running in the final scene and the windshield wipers when the end credits started scrolling. There was dead silence in the room. Nobody could get up and leave for at least two or three minutes. That’s how a good movie ends!
At the end of The Florida Project, when the girl finally finds happiness. In Anora, it’s the opposite. The adult woman is no longer in a happy fairy tale story of money, partying, and sex. Mikey Madison’s career-defining performance is potent in one of the best movie endings of the year.
Like the rest of Sean Baker’s filmography, Anora takes an unfiltered look at the main character’s life. Keeping up with the sex worker theme, we follow a stripper/escort who falls in love with a client. Russian actor Mark Edelstein plays an eccentric young man, son of a Russian oligarch. Heavily influenced in Fellini’s Nights of Cabiria, the neo-realist approach is still present with a true-to-life look at strip clubs, life in Brighton Beach, and Coney Island, and, of course, a bratty 21 years old boy wasting his parent’s fortune. All the drugs and sex are as raw and explicit as they can be.
A Comedic Touch
However, what makes this movie so great is how funny it can be without changing the lifelike tone. There is some dark humor and absurdism without distracting us. Somehow, Baker can keep his tone with characters who might as well have been in a Coens comedy going through a nerve-wracking situation that any Safdies film character would’ve experienced. Mikey Madison gives us a taste of hysteria that can easily be compared to Catherine Deneuve in Polanski’s Repulsion in a situation that reminded me of Almodovar’s Tie Me Up, Time Me Down.
In this underwhelming year, Anora stands out as one of the best movies released recently. It’s a great story about social class and the naivety of young adults, whether experiencing love or sex for the first time. After the end credits scroll and the screen fades to black, I hope Anora finds her happy place.
