Intimacy is a no-no

 ANORA (2024)

Reviewed by Jerry Saravia

I've known people that frequent strip clubs and most tell me that the intimacy is faked - it is not meant to be intimate but rather fulfilling a fantasy of intimacy with an alluring, sexy woman. If a stripper does a lap dance for you, it is only because you paid her for the service (and we won't even get into "Magic Mike" with male strippers). The patron may chit-chat with a stripper, who is getting a rise out of the male patron and you better check your watch because it is either by the hour or less. "Anora" seems to understand that world explicitly, and so does Anora herself but she is only a kid, a 23-year-old kid, who doesn't know any better when it comes to actual relationships. If she can fake intimacy, can someone else do the same thing to her?

Ani (Mikey Madison), her preferred name, is Russian and speaks the language fluently. She presumably lives with her parents in Brooklyn though she is not one to remember to buy milk after a busy night at the strip club. Ani is in firm control of her job and knows what she wants - money and nothing else. She is kind to her guests and smiles and we know, deep down, that it is an act but you have to make it sing or else, no tips. When Ani leaves her job and takes the train home, we see a different Ani, one who is tougher and stands her ground against her parents. One night at the busy club, she meets 21-year-old Ivan (Mark Eidelshtein) who is the son of a Russian oligarch and wants Ani to spend time in his luxurious waterfront mansion. They have lots of sex, of course, and she is later invited to a big party where sex and drugs mix (no surprise). Watching "Anora," I felt that something was going to give at some point. Ivan proposes marriage to Ani and she actually accepts and they get married in Vegas. She enthusiastically leaves her stripper job and moves into the mansion. Bad move. 

The fact that Ani really believes in Ivan is symptomatic of foolish young people falling in love too abruptly - does she really think Ivan loves her? Ani believes in him and we sense it is because he is financially loaded. But then the bitter truth emerges and it becomes too hard to swallow. When word gets around that Vanya got married, all hell breaks loose because he is not a citizen or a working resident. The mansion is not his - it belongs to his parents - and there's the matter of the insistent and belligerent Toro, Vanya's godfather and an Armenian priest (Karren Karagulian), who is Vanya's handler and reports to the parents about this crisis. This may be a fairy tale for Ani, but for Toro it is a nightmarish disaster which he and his stooges Garnick (Vache Tovmasyan) and Igor (Yura Borisov) manage to screw up, again and again. "Anora" is a gritty, stupendously vivid movie about strippers that becomes a hysterical comedy of errors. When Toros (a fabulously irate Karagulian) is in the middle of conducting a christening and gets emergency texts about Ivan, he leaves hastily and apologizes to everyone. The movie becomes comical and has a fervent, energetic pace that leaves you on edge. 

Mikey Madison is the true star of this movie, a genuine young woman who, despite a foul mouth and occasional foul moods, is changed when this young man enters her life. It becomes an idyllic love but only to her. She genuinely loves Ivan and she sense intimacy between them but she has no idea that he took her along for a ride - it was his newest purchase so he becomes more of a capitalist than even Ani. It is an insult to her, and to realize his love is feigned.

"Anora" is almost a rawer romantic comedy with a dollop of violent episodes and pratfalls involving Toros' henchmen who are not stereotypically brutal Russians (one gets sick and vomits, and another strings a phone cord around Ani's wrists and then lets her go). In an incredibly affecting final scene, Madison's Ani reveals her broken heart and it is not sentimental, just empathetic. This is not a moral lesson about how stripping or sex work leads to fatal repercussions - this is about revealing the humanity of women involved in a disreputable job. Intimacy may be a no-no in Ani's line of work yet it may be something she truly desires.