Finally, Some Good F*cking Food

It's "Anora" time.

I’m going to be honest. I started this Anora post, wrote nearly 400 words and then deleted every single one. I really want to write about this movie, but I’m not totally sure how.

I hate sounding like a run-of-the-mill reviewer, but that’s sometimes what happens when I write about things I love: The directing is magnificent, the lead performance is transcendent, the New York cinematography is gorgeous. Fucking kill me.

Anora—this generation’s Pretty Woman pushed through an Uncut Gems frantic pace—is exactly what I relish, a hodge-podge of ideas, themes and performances that make you laugh, think and feel every other possible emotion. It’s a breath of fresh air from the last few weeks when I had to write about Saturday Night and Joker: Folie à Deux and makes you feel optimistic about the entire art form and culture as a whole, especially since it’s playing like gangbusters in limited release, is already in the public consciousness and is potentially an Oscar frontrunner despite just coming out.

The story is as follows: Mikey Madison plays Anora (she prefers “Ani”) a stripper at an upscale New York nightclub who meets, romances and quickly marries the juvenile son of a Russian oligarch. It’s as if Cinderella was set in the 21st century but also loved to curse and give lapdances for cold, hard cash. This might sound like a mess, but it’s an easy movie to love, one that has more in common with early slapstick comedies than similarly-themed films like Hustlers.

The thing about Sean Baker that’s so exciting is that for a movie this cleanly laid out, the story is a constant mindfuck. Scenes that you think are going to be minute last for minutes on end, whilst big ideas that you assume will envelop the plot disintegrate at a moment’s notice. For something so lifelike, it has a fairy tale-esque quality that keeps you invested. Well, maybe more of a Grimm’s Fairy Tale.

The star, and reason for this all existing, is Mikey Madison, who gives one of my favorite lead performances of the year, along with Josh O’Connor in La Chimera, Demi Moore in The Substance and Adrien Brody in The Brutalist. Despite all giving top-tier performances, they couldn’t be more different. O'Connor and Brody both play reticent geniuses in vastly different worlds and Moore plays an over-the-hill, infuriated former starlet. Madison, on the other hand, plays a 21st-century girl we all know. A down-on-her-luck, headstrong woman constantly striving while also trying to live it up while she can. She just so happens to be paying the bills in a slightly different way.

Sean Baker has made a career out of documenting things rarely given this much credence on screen. Past films like The Florida Project and Red Rocket similarly dive into unheralded worlds, but Anora feels like a step up in both ideation and budget.

As Harry Styles might say, this feels like a movie and is both a laugh-out-loud, all-in-one-night (at times) romp and a treatise on the current tail-end of capitalist society that we’re all trudging through. It’s rare to watch a movie with such big ideas that is so deft on its feet that also demands a rewatch.

Madison’s Anora is the heliocentric center of the movie which is then filled to the brim with startingly good character actors from my personal favorite Igor played by Yuriy Borisov to Russian Chalamet Mark Eydelshteyn to Karren Karagulian’s infuriatingly funny Toros.

It’s always reassuring (and calming in a way) to watch something as mad as you are, while also being as entertaining as possible. I couldn’t recommend this one more. You should see it as soon as you can.

Also, I feel relatively okay about this review after reading it back. Writing/existential crisis over (for now).