If Adam Sandler’s The Black Diamond were a RomCom, it would look like Sean Baker’s Cannes highlight Anora: exhausting but irresistible.
Can you get sore muscles from movies? Certainly from uncomfortable theater seats, but movies? Anora, the new film from Red Rocket director Sean Baker, definitely comes close. As the credits glided across the screen, I found myself exhausted and drained in a dark hall in Cannes, but I still walked out of the cinema with a big grin on my face.
Anora gets your pulse racing in a way that only The Black Diamond with Adam Sandler can, and screams, beats and dances its way into your heart until you can’t get rid of it. I haven’t seen a better film in the Cannes 2024 vintage so far
Tarantino star Mikey Madison chases money and a husband in Anora
For leading lady Mikey Madison, Anora will hopefully turn into the Hollywood stepping stone she’s been hoping for since her appearances in Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood, Better Things and Scream. Madison plays the erotic dancer Ani, who makes a living in a New York City club with an inviting smile and patented service friendliness. Ani goes about her work professionally, always looking to increase her clients’ happiness and her paycheck.
When the Russian oligarch’s son Ivan (Mark Eydelshteyn) hires her as his girlfriend for a week, a new world opens up for Ani. The lovable Timothée Chalamet lookalike with a concentration deficit squanders his parents’ pocket money on parties, coke and trips to Vegas. Having fun, posting stories on IG, sleeping, having fun, etc. However, after they spontaneously get married, their life of fun and frolic comes to an abrupt end. The parents want to have the marriage annulled
(Mikey Madison as Manson Girl in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood)
Anora plays out first within a few days and then within about 24 hours. Because Ivan makes off and it’s up to Ani, the Armenian fixer Toros (Karren Karagulian) and his two wonderfully overwhelmed helpers Garnick (Vache Tovmasyan) and Igor (Yuriy Borisov) to pick him up in the Big Apple. Toros has to fulfill his parents’ order, but Ani is determined to prevent this. Together they form a bizarre quartet that insults each other but is forced to work together.
Anora presents us with a quartet to fall in love with
Sean Baker, who also wrote the screenplay, skillfully plays with expectations, works in some running gags in his funniest film to date and benefits from the chemistry of his cast. The petite Ani knows how to defend herself and doesn’t even stop at cupboards on two legs.
Anora begins as a euphoric speedrun of the lives of the super-rich and then turns into a turbulent and amusing journey through the night. Meanwhile, we come to love Toros, Igor and Garnick, who have not reckoned with the incredibly strong-willed bundle of energy at their side.
The three men try to make their own way in the land of opportunity. Just like Ani, they are paid to satisfy people. Their work costs them broken noses and frayed nerves. Almost all relationships in Anora are part of a transaction. However, the longer the rollercoaster ride with the likeable quartet lasts, the quicker the hope grows that someone will change that.
