‘I don’t have Instagram. I’m an adult, man...’
It often seems innately simple to determine what makes a ‘good’ actor or a ‘good’ performance but let’s break it down anyway. ‘Good’ acting involves the use of physicality, emotional intelligence and decision-making. It’s in the facial expressions, the body language, the ability to interact with other actors and the audience… a ‘good’ performance should be immersive. It should be something that an audience can get lost in. We must believe in the character. By all those metrics and whatever other metric you could name, Mikey Madison’s performance in Anora is exceptional – a genuine ‘star is born’ moment…
Madison plays the titular Anora (or ‘Annie’ as she prefers) – a sex worker who mostly operates out of a strip club in Brooklyn. One fateful night, she meets Vanya (Mark Eidelstein) – the son of a Russian oligarch. Their client-sex worker relationship eventually escalates when Annie realises that Vanya could be the man to lift her out of poverty. There are some concerns, however. Vanya is a man-child who spends much of his time either getting wasted or playing video games and he shuts down whenever his family is mentioned. When Vanya’s father (Aleksei Serebryakov) gets wind of the relationship he sends his Armenian handler Toros (Karren Karagulian), his brother Garnick (Aleksei Serebryakov) and their Russian henchman Igor (Yura Borisov) to retrieve Vanya and end the relationship.
Writer-director Sean Baker has already received plaudits and acclaim for his previous work (Tangerine, The Florida Project, Red Rocket) and with Anora he has established himself as a filmmaker with a unique vision. This is bravado, auteur filmmaking, and while Baker borrows from the British kitchen sink realists of the 1960s, as well as contemporary American filmmakers (Scorsese, Tarantino, the Coen brothers), Anora is a Sean Baker film more than anything else. It is also the film that will likely push him (and Madison) into the mainstream – despite the fact that Anora doesn’t compromise in terms of both explicit content and adult themes.
Baker has always been adept at combining comedy and tragedy but he achieves a level of pathos here unparalleled in his previous work. It’s an almost impossible balancing act to combine slapstick humour, moments of intense passion and deep sadness with a coherent plot, but Baker keeps all these disparate plates spinning beautifully here, and it’s also astonishing how the pace never lets up over 139 punishing minutes (a frantic approach to filmmaking that recalls the Safdie brothers and their ability to somehow sustain tension over long periods).
Anora is an instant-impact kinda film. It will make a star of Madison and Baker. It will be studied and adored and discussed ad nauseam. Believe the hype. Along with Kneecap – this is the best film of 2024.
