Here’s a fun fact for all my fact fans out there! Three years ago when I “rebooted” my blog and started on the site we find ourselves on today, my first post was a review of Sean Baker’s Red Rocket. It was one of those films where you thought, here is someone reaching the apex of their potential, a director/writer/editor truly blossoming and creating their defining work. In itself, that was a silly thought as Baker’s previous two films, Tangerine and The Florida Project are already recognised as innovative and masterful in their own ways, but the point remains that for me, Red Rocket was this gleeful victory lap of pure cinematic excellence. Reader, I don’t enjoy when I’m quite so spectacularly proven wrong, but in this case my lack of foresight has brought us to the Palme D’or winning film Anora.

As Baker always does with his films, Anora follows a character whose world is rarely the focus of mainstream films. Anora (who goes by Ani) is a sex worker in New York, working in a club every night to make ends meet with her friends and a few enemies . One day, she is requested to entertain a customer as she is the only girl in the club who speaks his language and is introduced to Ivan, a wealthy Russian who puts the boy into playboy. The two hit it off and quite quickly it becomes clear that this isn’t a case of a horny patron and the worker playing up the charm. Instead, after a week of what’s often dubbed “the girlfriend experience” (in which sex workers are paid not just for sex but also for their presence around the clock and at social events) Ani and Ivan elope in Vegas, smiles immovable from their faces. However, Ivan’s wealthy parents aren’t exactly pleased with their new daughter in law and seek to do all they can to get the marriage annulled. It cleanly splits the film into two parts, with one a breezy and romantic comedy, the other a more hectic and still comedic dive through New York. As a structure, I loved that. The first half gets to set up our characters very cleanly and introduces their world in a way that is almost too intense, before completely changing pace in the second half and bringing in both broader laughs and harder hits. Here, as he did in Red Rocket, Baker uses structure as an offensive tool to put the audience on the backfoot and it’s a tool more writers should learn to love.

If you’re going to name your film after your title character, you need to be sure that you’ve picked the right character to back. To little surprise, Baker knows exactly what he’s doing and in Mikey Madison he finds perfection. She may be familiar to you from Scream 5 or Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, the latter of which I found her performance somewhat unsettling in because of her young age. It was so chilling to see a psychopathic character that young, not least because of the violent end she meets, and by young I mean that Madison is my age. We share a birth year but fear not, we don’t share talent, because she is on fire here in ways that few young performers are, and certainly ways that no young writers are. I was reminded of seeing Timothée Chalamet in Call Me by Your Name, watching a performer come from seemingly nowhere, achieve acting bliss and demand almost every scene of a feature film. That’s exactly what Madison is doing, though carving her own trail with great vigour. To throw in another reference point, her portrayal of Ani reminded me of Julia Fox in Uncut Gems, both creating loud and volatile women who care far more deeply than they are given credit for. Not only does Madison get the gift of a deeper role than Fox had, but she also gets to bring a complexity to her character. Ani is fun and brash and loud, absolutely, but she is her anxieties too, she has faults that are never explicitly mentioned but that filter through to the audience via the decisions she makes. To be honest, with this screenplay I think Anora would have been a great character in anyone’s hands. With Madison though, we find ourselves watching a legendary figure emerge fully formed.

That’s not to underplay how great everyone else is too, Baker once again casting smaller actors or even non-professional actors to terrific effect. A few unknown faces who stood out to me were Lindsey Normington as a villainous colleague to Ani, Mark Eidelshtein as the sweet but stunted Ivan and a hilariously pathetic turn from Vache Tovmasyan as one of the goons sent after Ani. There were familiar faces too to delight in, like scene stealer Brittney Rodriguez from Red Rocket popping up to once again lay down the law. Karren Karagulian is credited in all of Sean Baker’s past films and I confess, I didn’t recognise him from any of them, but I love his work here as the overworked and under skilled Toros, a figure whose opening scene has some of the best laughs of the entire film. All the actors I’ve mentioned here do great work, but the one who comes closest to Madison’s sublime art is Yura Borisov. Funnily enough, I last saw him in the film Compartment No. 6, a film which I saw directly before Red Rocket at the 2021 London Film Festival (and on which I’ve also written a piece I’m deeply proud of.) Baker saw Compartment too and understood the range Borisov had, putting it to brilliant work in his first English language role. I don’t want to say too much about the character as he mainly factors into the last half of the film, but once again Borisov presents us with a character who is so blatantly presenting as one type of person that you don’t even question that this may be a façade for another type of person. No spoilers, you go and discover for yourself.

While I’m writing about the technical elements of a film, especially one I’m seeing at a film festival, I worry it can become easy for the whole thing to seem quite clinical, for me to make every film sound like a bit of an exam for how good a film watcher you are. If so, allow me to clarify that Anora is a hell of a lot of fun. Baker’s films have always been funny but with Ani being a much more (though not entirely) likeable protagonist than disgraced former pornstar Mikey in Red Rocket, the laughs come with more certainty and ease. Her situation is ridiculous and the ridiculousness comes from outside her, so it’s comfortable to laugh along with her at the heightened stupidity of so much that happens. The laughs being more comfortable doesn’t mean that the film is a breeze though, it does get, for want of a better word, sticky. Ani’s profession means that there is an underlying tension to the whole film because of how cruel we know the world can be to sex workers, and with the emotional high point of a wedding coming in the middle of the film, you find yourself wondering how long things will stay this good. That feeling extends right through to the final scene, which I won’t spoil other than to say this; as it was happening I found the ending an anti-climax, yet as I was watching every other film I saw that day I kept thinking about how powerful the ending of Anora is. It reveals a fact about Ani that she has hidden well and it colours the rest of the film in shades you may not have considered. Baker knows how to end a film and with Anora he eschews comedy for absolute pathos.

Baker transforms a Take That song […] into a euphoric anthem that legitimately brought me to tears.

This should be the bit where I talk about the technical elements, but I don’t know if I can? I was so swept away by the pace of Anora that I forgot to remember I was watching a film. Broadly speaking, that’s only ever a sign that the technical elements of the film are pitch perfect. The cinematography from Drew Daniels proves that filming on celluloid will always make films pop out the screen at you, Baker’s editing allows the pace to ebb and flow in ways that allow the audience just enough time to relax and the music choices are absolutely inspired. There’s a lot of hip-hop in the film, exactly the kind of stuff that makes for good music during whatever it is they do in those clubs, but the rogue music choices are even better than the expected. A Tatu needle drop delighted but somehow, using alchemical magic, Baker transforms a Take That song (very specifically, a remix of the song from their cinematic jukebox musical that no one saw) into a euphoric anthem that legitimately brought me to tears. I do not know how he does it. This is a director working not even at the height of his powers but at the height of cinematic power, somehow finding time to do that and nod towards a character from Red Rocket with a billboard that will draw audience minds towards Showgirls in a knowing tip of the hat. Sean Baker has been a talent to watch for about a decade and if you hadn’t been paying attention, now is the perfect time to catch up.

Make no mistake, Anora is a crowdpleaser of a film, a comedy that makes you laugh hard enough that its deeper tendrils are burrowed deep and quickly. You should make your parents watch it, though I wouldn’t watch it with your parents unless they’re very cool about a lot of things that most parents are not. Through such an appealing comedy, Baker sneaks in a fully realised depiction of a sex worker with an interior life as rich as her exterior life is flashy, creating a nuanced portrayal of a group of people who are so often victimised and criminalised, especially in the UK. That’s punk rock as hell. If for no other reason, that should get you out the house and into the cinema for Anora when it releases in the UK on 1st November.