Let us get one thing out of the way first. The thesis that too many films are now longer than necessary is not a crazy one. You might reasonably back away from a knockabout comedy that is almost exactly the same length as 2001: A Space Odyssey. One marvel (among many) of Sean Baker’s mainstream breakthrough is that not one of its 140 minutes feels wasted. Anora, winner of the Palme d’Or at Cannes and current favourite for the best-picture Oscar, begins at a clatter and only accelerates from there. So much life is contained in its bulging package. Maybe the film is a little too short.
With projects such as Tangerine and The Florida Project, Baker has exercised his concern for the United States’ more undervalued communities. There is some of that here too. Mikey Madison, in a notable breakout, plays Anora, a good-spirited stripper from the Russian-American streets of south Brooklyn. Fluent in her ancestors’ tongue, she finds herself introduced to “Vanya” Zakharov (Mark Eydelshteyn), son of an oligarch, when he bursts into the club and sets to draining their vodka reserves.
The hyped-up young man pays Anora $15,000 to spend the week with him, and after a few days of booze, video games and sex they develop something like a genuine affection. A hasty marriage ensues, triggering seven levels of fury among Vanya’s family. Toros (Karren Karagulia), an Orthodox priest and the young man’s godfather, sends Igor (Yura Borisov), a hard man with a soft heart, to persuade Anora to accept an annulment. She vigorously refuses. The predictably yellow Vanya flees the mansion and heads for the city. Bridegroom and Russian heavies make uneasy common cause and pursue.
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More than a few critics have seen something of a harder, rougher-edged Pretty Woman in the opening scenario. Our heroine is earthier and more foul-mouthed than Julia Roberts’s character. The drunk, ill-educated Vanya has little in common with Richard Gere bar gender. But the comparison has some superficial merit. A better parallel, particularly after the chase begins, is with the classic screwball comedy of the 1930s and 1940s: The Awful Truth, Bringing Up Baby, His Girl Friday.
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Those films invariably hung around a spirited young woman with a relentless line in unfiltered sass, a person you both love and fear, and Madison could hardly be better suited to the role. Firing out the profane dialogue with the fury of someone permanently stubbing a toe – this is the season’s sweariest film and all the better for it – she hides vulnerability within aggression right to up a closing, successful change in tone.
The surrounding character actors were at least as important to screwball mood. The Russian performers here have the creased, worn-in faces we remember from the likes of Charles Coburn or Broderick Crawford. Such is the nimbleness of their characterisation – miles from the off-the-peg Russian villains of too much modern pulp – that the fixers, associates and senior family members never, despite conspicuous power, offer any violent threat to Anora. Indeed, she is more of a danger to the henchmen than they are to her. That was always the way with the firecrackers of old.
Yura Borisov, as Igor the bruiser, excels in the unlikely task of smoothing waters and injecting a little sensitivity into the later stages. This is a film that, countering its blaring riffs with gentler underscores, will repay countless rewatches. Drew Daniels’s mobile camera finds beauty in the small-hours grime of Brighton Beach. The screenplay wears its research into the sex industry lightly. The editing swings from sharp jab to mighty roundhouse. No purer entertainment has come our way this year.
In cinemas from Friday, November 1st
