A young exotic dancer in a higher-end strip club meets an even younger millionaire from Russia who simply requests a girl who can speak Russian. The dashing young socialite is presented with Ani (Mikey Madison of Scream, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood), who understands Russian better than she speaks it, as her grandmother never learned to speak English.
Ani is a stripper by trade and sometimes escort. The two quickly hit it off over shots of vodka and end up having sex in a private room upstairs. Before we know it, Ani is living at the adolescent-seeming playboy’s mansion, flying his private jet to Las Vegas, and before we know it, they’re married in wild American style at a Vegas wedding chapel. Ani, our streetwise and spunky protagonist, is a contemporary princess—but not of the Disney fashion.
The first part of Anora, the newest release (and Palme d’Or winner) from Sean Baker (The Florida Project) now playing at the The SLO Film Center at the Palm Theatre, has the makings of a New Millennium fairy tale or fantasy, and we are drawn in by the stylish outfits, crowded clubs, and pounding beats.
Cinema fantasies are seductive—not just for the characters involved, but also for the viewers. We want the characters to realize their fantasies because in some ways, those fantasies are ours, and “happily ever after” sounds attractive in our frantically-paced, media-drowned world.
But perfect fantasies are not realty, and Baker understands that good stories are rarely fantasies.
Most people have some familiarity with the Cinderella story, and it’s easy to think of the previous reigning film in this mode, Pretty Woman, but Anora teases us with that familiar structure throughout most of its first part where we get the meeting, the frenzied courtship, the flight to Nevada, and the hasty wedding chapel marriage, and our heroes are safe now, protected by the bands of matrimony, including a priceless wedding ring with three (no, four!) karats.
Ani’s new husband Ivan (played with great flourish by Mark Eydelshteyn), or Vanya as he prefers, is not a prince without a father and family. His father is a multi-millionaire Russian oligarch and the one holding the money and the power. When photos and rumors appear in the tabloids that Ivan Zakharov has married an American sex worker, the real plot gets underway.
As viewers, we have to wonder how serious these two lovers are. Vanya is undoubtably drunk and high when he proposes in bed with her in their Vegas suite, and Ani looks at her younger suitor with some suspicion, but also a slight hope in her eyes that this may be real. Though when he sarcastically asks her if she’s in love with him or his money, she concedes “the money,” and they both laugh.
Regardless of what they really think or feel, once it’s confirmed by the family that something has gone very publicly wrong, the hammer of reality falls on our naïve lovers, and the real fun begins.
Aside from fantasy, the movie touches on ideas of youth and class.”
Enter the comic relief in the form of Vanya’s dour, ever solemn handler—and Papa Zakharov’s fixer —Toros (played in masterful deadpan by Karren Karagulian). He’s an Armenian deacon who doffs his priestly vestments, hands over a baby, and leaves a church in the middle of a baptism he is presiding over when he gets the call from his Russian master who evidently has more power over him and worldly affairs than even God.
Toros is attended by his two bumbling henchmen, Garnick (Vache Tovmasyan) and the real sleeper and surprise in this movie, Igor (Yura Borisov)—watch this character closely as he manifests into one of the most interesting players in the film.
Toros and his two henchmen have a difficult time subduing Ani in a raucous domestic fight scene that leaves Garnick with a broken nose and wreaks havoc and destruction in the mansion’s posh living room. The scene is somewhat drawn out (as are some other scenes, perhaps the movie’s one weakness), but bringing someone from delusion to reality is a struggle, and it doesn’t happen instantly (filming this sequence took almost a third of the entire shooting time at ten days).
Vanya is completely stripped of his magic and flees on a nihilistic bender as he regresses to the immature boy he really is, and Toros, the henchmen, and Ani set out in a chaotic pursuit through high society nightclubs and all-night restaurants in a desperate attempt to find him and annul the marriage.
It seems every time we think this movie is at its end, it has more twists in store . . .”
Aside from fantasy, the movie touches on ideas of youth and class. In an all-night restaurant, Toros confronts a group of younger eastern Europeans who are annoyed with him disrupting their late-night early morning meal, and he chastises them about their lack of a work ethic, goals, or respect for their elders while they groan and roll their eyes telling him to leave them be.
Eventually, in spite of her moxie and streetwise American outlook trusting in courts and laws, Ani finds that the legal system is much more amenable to those with money, power, and connections whether they are Americans or not.
Vanya’s parents arrive and the fantasy is dispelled. They are the very masks of tragedy and comedy. His mother is the no-nonsense evil Russian matriarch who goes right up into Ani’s conciliatory grill and destroys even the dream of a legal battle, while Vanya’s father laughs uncontrollably at Ani’s belligerent resistance to his wife’s will.
It seems every time we think this movie is at its end, it has more twists in store, and we’re left with Ani and Igor (the henchman who’s not as goofy as broken-nosed Garnick). Ani is paid off for a “green card wedding” and the fantasy ends. The scenes with Ani and Igor are surprisingly, almost bitterly, tender. Igor turns out to be a regular guy trying to do his job and keep her safe while she is traumatized from the destruction of her dream. Some fantasies may become realities, radically different in their final form.
After everything, Ani does not leave the game empty handed. After some events and revelations too good to examine here, she is sitting in an old car with Igor, her recent Russian acquaintance. He confesses the car is his grandmother’s, whom he also lives with. It was Ani’s grandmother (and her language) who ultimately got her into this adventure, and we leave the movie thinking of those two old women and the crazy stories they precipitated captured in this multi-faceted story of America.