Anora

Anora (Mikey Madison) and Vanya’s (Mark Eydelshteyn) nuptials are preceded by a brief courtship that begins at the strip club where she works and escalates when he pays her $15,000 to be his exclusive inamorata; despite its transactional beginnings, there’s no doubt that the two are sincerely, deeply in love. If a sex worker and the layabout son of a Russian oligarch sound like an odd pairing, know that Sean Baker has made a career of crafting similarly unusual — and unusually affecting — onscreen relationships.

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I’ve been waiting more than a decade for the writer/director to make a movie I like more than Starlet, his excellent 2012 drama about an adult film actress who forges an unexpected friendship with a woman in her eighties. He’s come close a few times — Tangerine was lovely, ditto The Florida Project — and finally done it this time around. Anora is his magnum opus, the film he’ll be most closely associated with for the rest of his career — unless he can somehow top it, which I wouldn’t put past him.

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The same can be said of Madison. Any superlative you can think of — star-making, career-defining — applies to her performance while still falling short of conveying its raw, visceral power. This is acting at its most vibrant and vulnerable, which isn’t to say that Ani, despite her increasingly difficult circumstances, is a damsel in distress. Quite the contrary: she has all the kinetic energy of a loaded gun, the kind you can fit in your purse for quick access when the night goes pear-shaped.

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Anora is an Uzbek name, and apparently one of low standing, hence why she goes by Ani. The name we’re given and the name we prefer are fundamental aspects of our identity, and they aren’t always aligned. Baker has always been attuned to characters forging their own identities, even and especially when that necessitates going against what people expect of them.

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Being head over heels is a lot like getting ahead of your skis, and often ends the same way. Vanya was originally meant to return home from New York (namely Brighton Beach, where Russian-speaking immigrants abound) to the motherland before he decided to get married, and he didn’t exactly tell his mother and father that he tied the knot — an intentional oversight that risks dooming his marriage. This has to do not only with Ani’s line of work but also how quickly the nuptials came about; appearances are everything in his parents’ world.

Anora is, among other things, the funniest movie in ages.

This is far from the first time Baker has made a movie about a sex worker, and indeed he went so far as to dedicate the Palme d’Or to all members of the profession “past, present, and future” while accepting his well-deserved prize at Cannes earlier this year. He’s long been drawn to members of marginalized communities, the kind that don’t usually receive such gentle treatment onscreen. Few filmmakers take such a humanistic approach or display such consistent, enduring affection for their own characters — qualities you don’t realize how much you appreciate until you see such a stirring example of it. In caring for his characters so deeply, he makes you care for them too.

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Even the thugs tasked with strong-arming Ani and Vanya into annulling their marriage are ultimately portrayed as well-meaning, with one of them (Yura Borisov) slowly emerging as the most sympathetic character other than Ani herself. The haphazard scheme to force the two apart, though nefarious, also proves hilarious — Anora is, among other things, the funniest movie in ages.

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It’s also so vibrant and alive you’ll want to stay in its world, even when the exuberant joy of its first act inevitably gives way to something darker and more melancholy. What happens onscreen doesn’t always stay onscreen, especially when it’s as moving as Anora.