“Anora”, a tale of strippers and oligarchs, wins at Cannes

AS A FILM-MAKER, Sean Baker is gripped by one subject: the lives of sex workers in America. He has made a string of low-budget—but highly praised—comedy-dramas on the topic, including “Tangerine” (2015), “The Florida Project” (2017) and “Red Rocket” (2021). His latest, “Anora”, a rambunctious farce about a stripper, had its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival this year. What makes Mr Baker’s work unique is that he balances deeply researched, down-to-earth naturalism with humour and humanity. What could be depressing stories about the downtrodden or the marginalised are instead fizzily entertaining.

You can understand, then, why his work might appeal to Greta Gerwig, the co-writer and director of “Barbie”, who led the judging panel in Cannes. Announcing the Palme d’Or, the festival’s top prize, on May 25th, Ms Gerwig called “Anora” “truthful and unexpected” and compared it to the polished comedies of Ernst Lubitsch, the director of “Ninotchka”, and Howard Hawks (“Bringing Up Baby”, “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes”). In her own films, including “Lady Bird” (2017) and “Little Women” (2019) as well as “Barbie”, Ms Gerwig has told wry stories of young women seeking fulfilment and independence. Like Mr Baker, she is interested in the ways in which protagonists’ options are shaped and narrowed by forces beyond their control.

The heroine of “Anora” is Ani, played with irresistible gusto by Mikey Madison. A 23-year-old stripper from Brooklyn, Ani so impresses one of the customers in a grubby Manhattan lap-dancing club that he pays her $15,000 to be his girlfriend for a week. The premise has echoes of “Pretty Woman” and “Indecent Proposal”, Hollywood hits from the early 1990s about rich men paying young women to sleep with them, but Mr Baker’s take on the material is less fanciful.

Rather than being a handsome sophisticate of the type played by Richard Gere and Robert Redford in those films, Ani’s patron is a young Russian twerp named Vanya (Mark Eydelshteyn) who is due to start working for his billionaire father, but who would prefer to keep playing video games, snorting drugs and taking private jets to luxury hotel suites. He is so immature that he cannot quite believe that he has lured a beautiful woman into his glass-walled mansion—or rather, his parents’ glass-walled mansion—and so goofily affable that when he suggests marrying her in Las Vegas, Ani doesn’t just see the union as a way to make a quick buck. Touchingly, she thinks they might have a future together.

Mr Baker does not offer her a happy ending as straightforward as that. A day or two after the drunken Las Vegas nuptials, Vanya’s father dispatches Armenian and Russian henchmen to get the marriage annulled, and Ani has to fight to keep her new husband (or at least to keep some of his money). At this halfway point, the film switches from the wild party to the morning-after hangover, from Las Vegas swimming pools to Coney Island back alleys, from a giddy romantic comedy to a gritty detective yarn.

The surprise is that it keeps getting funnier and more energetic. In a certain light, it even becomes more romantic. With each new twist, it seems as if “Anora” might turn violent. On each occasion, Ani proves to be more resourceful than anyone expects.

Again, that is not to imply that a cosy happy ending is in store. “Anora” is bracingly honest about the struggles of being part of a working-class immigrant family and the steamrolling power of the super-rich. Whereas some films would present the henchmen as menacing thugs, and Ani as their helpless victim, this one suggests that all four of them are at the mercy of oligarchs who have forgotten what it is like not to get their way at all times. Ultimately, “Anora” is a wistful and shrewdly political work, but it is so rowdy and hilarious that its true depth might not be apparent until the last scene. ■