“Anora”: Winner of the 2025 Academy Awards for Best Direction, Best Original Screenplay, Best Editing (all by Sean Baker), Best Actress (Mikey Madison) and Best Picture.
This is a complicated film. It begins with a somewhat silly, extremely graphic sexual relationship between a wealthy Russian boy, Vanya (Mark Eydelshteyn – “Strange Sasha”), and the exotic dancer and prostitute, Ani/Anora (Mikey Madison – “Scream”), he meets at a strip club. The boy turns out to be the son of a Russian oligarch, having a last fling in the United States before returning to Russia and becoming part of his parent’s empire. The boy is childishly enthusiastic, but that appeals to Ani, and when, on a whim to visit Las Vegas, he proposes, she accepts and they are married. All this is interspersed with intense sex scenes that some will find offensive.
Ani gives up her job and they settle into the carefree lives of wealthy lovers in a fairy-tale mansion, with every pampered wish fulfilled, and a staff to make sure there is plenty to eat and drink, and to clean up after them.
However, the truth is that all this belongs to Vanya’s absent parents and when they get word of this back in Russia, they are coming to annul this foolish mistake. Meanwhile, their largely incompetent underlings, cartoonishly represented as Toros (Karren Karagulian – “Red Rocket”), Garnick (Vache Tovmasyan – “Golden School”) and more sensitively, Igor (Yura Borisov – “Compartment Number 6”), attempt to control Vanya and Ani until the parents arrive.
Writer/director/editor Sean Baker has given us a screwball comedy with a tender edge, updated to the hedonistic, conversationally illiterate age in which we supposedly live. The inability of the lead characters to speak a single sentence without at least one use of the “F” word is degrading, disappointing and in the sharpest contrast to the more literate entries for the Best picture nomination this year. But, as I said, it is the age in which we live, and this is still an amazing story and production that only cost about $6 million.
The “rags to riches to rags” story told here is hardly new, but it does have a freshness, and if you can make it to the end (139 minutes), there is a gentle humanity that finally breaks through the crudities and the merry mayhem of the preceding 135 minutes.
There is virtually no musical soundtrack to this film, aside from the garish music in the various clubs that are visited, and that adds immeasurably to the realism of the scenes. Cinematography, staging of the interaction between Ani and the underlings, and of course the Oscar-winning editing are all excellent.
Note: Yura Borisov was nominated for Best Supporting Actor. While his performance might not have been as good as some of the other nominees, it was certainly superior to the formulaic antics of Kieran Culkin in “A Real Pain.”
Runtime: Two hours, 19 minutes
Availability: In theaters; for rent on many streaming sites
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