Anora

★★★★½

Sean Baker has been on a cinematic crusade to destigmatize sex work. From 2015’s “Tangerine” to 2021’s “Red Rocket,” the filmmaker has sought to paint the industry and those who give themselves to it with a delicately humanistic brush, looking beyond the body and into the soul, affording sex workers the same empathy and complexity deserved of any other person. With his latest film, “Anora,” which screened at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival, Baker turns his camera on a young woman stripped of her identity and agency by a cold world that means to reduce her entirely to the work she does for a living.

The young woman’s name is Anora, or Ani as she prefers to be called. She’s a charmingly crass and brash exotic dancer at a Manhattan club, who has made a life for herself among the hustle and grind of her fellow dancers. She speaks halfway-decent Russian, so when Ivan, the infectiously freewheeling son of a Russian oligarch, visits the club, the pair quickly hit it off. One private dance and a few house-calls later, and Ivan has hired Ani to be his girlfriend for a week, sparking an intense whirlwind romance that sends the pair to an impromptu marriage in Las Vegas. Marital bliss is cut short, however. Ivan’s parents in Russia have caught wind of the news, and their lackeys have been tasked with getting the marriage annulled.

Sean Baker’s film manages a delicate balancing act of tones. Ani and Ivan’s fast-tracked love story is laced with a crackling electricity; even before the deliriously euphoric montage of Vegas indulgences that closes act one, it is entertaining to no end to watch Ani’s explosive vulgarity mingle with Ivan’s arrested adolescence. Then when the family’s Stateside handler and his two henchmen arrive to break up the party, Baker turns the film into a full-on screwball comedy. Ani hurls relentless (and inventive) obscenities at the bumbling and clueless Armenians that have invaded Ivan’s home, while the spoiled rich kid is nowhere to be found. What follows is the unlikeliest of journeys across Brooklyn.

But the other end of this tonal balance is the piercing undercurrent of melancholy that sits below the film’s madcap comedy exterior. Something chilly and tragic infects every moment of fun, and it’s hard to put a finger on exactly what it is until the film’s unforgettable final moments. At its close, “Anora” cracks itself open to reveal its soul in a way that forces you to reexamine your emotional relationship with everything until then, and the film’s simmering gloom retroactively feels a whole lot less subtextual.

This magic trick is only the second most impressive feat of transformation in the film, though. As Anora, Mikey Madison delivers one of the most fearless performances I have ever seen. She’s vibrant and fierce, and devastating and entrancing. Madison inhabits the character so wholly, with such complete abandon, the two become one and the same; they may as well begin engraving the Oscar now. Mark Eidelstein plays wonderfully off her as the buoyant Ivan, effortlessly producing the film’s biggest laughs in a performance of juvenile impulses and carefree magnetism. His parents’ right-hand man of sorts, Toros, provides the fiery Karren Karagulian an opportunity to play the straight-man to everyone else’s wild swings, but of the film’s trio of henchmen it is Yura Borisov as the boorish Igor who most impresses, highlighting the shades of a deceptively simple character with arguably the film’s most complex performance.

And this is Sean Baker’s greatest strength: his ability to earnestly craft raw human characters that conceal enormous depth behind outward simplicity. In “Anora,” characters’ inability to recognize this quality within the titular stripper, frequently robbed of her personhood and reduced to a simple plaything, is precisely how Baker combats the stigmatization of sex workers. Why doesn’t Ani get a say in the annulment of her own marriage? Who are these men to tell her what she can and cannot do?

Baker’s thematic scope goes even wider. There’s something very telling about the power dynamics at play that result in Anora ultimately joining the city-wide search for the missing Ivan, and something even more compelling about the unexpected allegiances that form on this journey. Sure, these men broke into Ivan’s home and tossed Ani around, but perhaps they’re just as much a victim of Ani’s narrow perceptions as she is of theirs. After all, they’re just bodies on Ivan’s family’s payroll, just as she all-too-recently was herself. Like all his other work, Baker’s latest is also about class.

For a filmmaker who has tackled similar themes throughout his career, “Anora” marks an unquestionable high-point. Thrilling and moving in equal measure, a boundlessly alive piece of true movie magic. It soars, it screams, it sings with a deafening singularity, and frankly, I had an amazing time watching it. It pulls off the rare feat of shifting between achingly funny and achingly sad on a dime, frequently within the span of a single scene, and Baker has never felt more formally in control of his craft. His compassion and delicacy is tangibly felt even as — or especially when — the film is preoccupied with its delightfully profane spectacle of humour and drama. As a glitzy stripper with a hidden vulnerability, Anora herself is much the same way.

This film was reviewed as part of the 2024 edition of the Toronto International Film Festival