Anora

COMIC DRAMA; 2hr 19min

STARRING: Mikey Madison, Mark Eydelshteyn


I do? Eydelshteyn and Madison

Manhattan strip-club lap dancer Anora “Ani” Mikheeva (Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood ’s Madison) is a slinky beauty who approaches her taxing job with the matter-of-factness of a workhorse on a production line. Being of Russian descent, she can also speak the language, which comes in handy when a VIP club client enlists her services.

 

Ivan “Vanya” Zakharov (Eydelshteyn) is a frisky puppy so bowled over by Ani’s sinuous routines that he offers her $15,000 to spend the week with him. At 23, Ani is just two years older than Vanya but with a world of smarts beneath her garter belt, she is the survivalist inverse of everything he represents. Of course she says yes — to the romance and the cash. Why not?

 

So begins a blur of booze, sex and video games, with Ani on the clock as Vanya’s new flame. Unsurprisingly, Vanya has no desire to trade his perpetual high for a grown-up job in Russia. When the gang — because with any spoiled brat there always has to be one — flies to Vegas, he asks Ani to marry him. He gets a green card, she gets a massive rock, a fur coat and an infantile husband. Done and done! Although with one significant hitch: back home in Mother Russia, Vanya’s mother (Darya Ekamasova as Galina Zakharov) is spitting chips at the news of her wayward son’s demeaning antics and dispatches three enforcers to rein him in while she fires up the jet.

 

The Palme d’Or–winning mayhem that then ensues is masterminded by writer-director Sean Baker (The Florida Project) with the sustained hysteria of a bad acid trip. Vanya takes off to get wasted, leaving the miserable foursome to hit the road in hot pursuit while a furious Ani fends tooth and nail for herself.

 

The downside of tangling with the über-rich when you fail to share their rarefied lane is that regardless of how hard you go, you can never hope to outpace them. That Galina is an ice bitch from hell will come as no surprise. It’s Madison’s Ani, with the grit of her hard-won sparkle and the price she pays to shine, whose wounded bravura eclipses everybody in her path.