‘Anora’

In​ a recent interview Sean Baker said he likes to resist purely ‘grey and drab’ moments in life or movies. ‘Even when I’m going through hard times, I still see colour.’ This is literally true of the palette of his films and especially of the scenes at Brighton Beach and Coney Island in his new movie, Anora, which won the Palme d’Or at Cannes this year. It is perhaps even more true metaphorically. Grim, difficult lives look like one long party, at least for a while and onscreen, a matter of booze and pot and shrieking laughter. The claim also helps us to understand another of Baker’s remarks. The first hour of the film, he says, belongs to the genre of romantic comedy. This makes interesting sense if we are ready to reconsider the meanings of romance and comedy.

Ani (Mikey Madison) is a lap dancer at a club in Manhattan. Just in case we don’t know what her job entails, we get an extended portrait of her work as the opening credits roll. A row of men lie back in armchairs while a series of naked women, including Ani, clamber over them. The men seem more baffled than satisfied, and it can hardly be an accident that they look like a movie audience whose vision is somehow impeded.

Sometimes the dancers engage in other activities, taking their clients to closed rooms upstairs, and it is in this context, lap and after, that Ani meets Ivan, played by Mark Eydelshteyn. Her boss thinks she’s the right connection for this new client because he is Russian and she speaks the language. She pretends to apologise for her poor grasp of it, and he speaks a hectic mixture of Russian and English. Both actors are very convincing here. They project a chaotic charm that is fragile but infectious. It’s not clear that the characters fall in love, but they certainly find each other endlessly entertaining, and soon he is buying time with her outside the club.

He introduces her to his father’s vast modern mansion in Brooklyn, where they giggle and have energetic sex. She sleeps now and again and he plays video games. When asked who or what his father is, Ivan says he’s a big drug dealer. Then he laughs and tries another joke. He is a big gun dealer. This time Ani doesn’t even start to believe him, and Ivan invites her to Google what she needs to know. Before either of them has time to think about what is going on – the question ‘what is happening?’ is a refrain that appears again and again in the movie, loaded with increasing desperation and never answered – they take off for Las Vegas and are married. Ivan has proposed with sudden seriousness. Ani has her doubts but says yes. A bit later Ivan offers a practical reason for his plea – if he marries an American citizen he will get a green card, and not have to go back to Russia and the rule of his parents. What’s romantic here is a shared feeling of attachment, whatever its basis, and what’s comic is the absence of any sense of what is to come.

The second part of the film – an hour and twenty minutes or so – is not romantic. It is comic, but the comedy is full of trouble and the trouble gets worse. In an Orthodox church somewhere in New York, a man called Toros (Karren Karagulian) is taking part in a baptism ceremony, wearing a robe and acting as a godfather. The fact that he is holding the baby makes it difficult for him to answer his insistent mobile phone. He can’t ignore it, though. He passes the baby on to someone else, takes off his robe and leaves the ceremony, murmuring excuses. He is Ivan’s godfather too, and more important, he is Ivan’s father’s chief fixer in America, and he has just learned of Ivan’s marriage. This can’t happen, even though it has, and Toros sends two assistants, Garnick and Igor (Vache Tovmasyan and Yura Borisov), to the mansion to initiate the undoing of this terrible event. Ivan tries to keep them out, fails and runs off himself – a good portion of the rest of the film involves a picaresque search for him in the neighbourhood’s shops and restaurants and clubs.

Ivan’s departure leaves Ani alone with Garnick and Igor. The slapstick is fierce here and goes on for a long time. (‘You can feel … the very genre foundations shifting beneath the characters’ feet,’ as Justin Chang put it in the New Yorker.) Igor struggles to tie up Ani’s hands and keep her still, but she manages to break Garnick’s nose by kicking out at him. Things are a little calmer when Toros arrives, but Ani keeps swearing at everyone with furious, heroic persistence and displays a touching faith in the sturdiness of legal marriage. She also imagines that if Ivan was still there he would stand with her against the invaders.

In what may be the film’s funniest scene, Ivan, finally found, is dragged to a New York courtroom where a judge is to annul the marriage. Ivan doesn’t understand anything because he is too drunk, Toros won’t stop talking, and the judge kicks them all out. In any case, a Las Vegas marriage, it seems, can be annulled only in Las Vegas.

Meanwhile, Ivan’s parents arrive from Russia and the intriguing comedy of the helplessness of tough guys gives way to a picture of what power looks like when it means business. Ani makes a brave attempt to address Ivan’s mother (Darya Ekamasova) as if this was the beginning of a beautiful relationship. It says a lot about the atmosphere the film has created by now that this gesture towards normality should seem so insanely abnormal. The mother ignores Ani, and a little later, when Ani insists on her legal rights and says she will not go to Las Vegas, the mother makes clear what the stakes are and how dangerous it is, not only for Ani but for her own mother and friends, to provoke the wrath of the very rich. Ani gets on the plane.

Ivan’s father (Aleksei Serebryakov) takes no part in these non-negotiations, but he does laugh a lot at the whole show. The laughter seems entirely appropriate, a sort of loyalty to comedy when one sees it, and also monstrous, a cruel confirmation of the rights of whoever Google says he is.

Ivan, now sober, is not going to question the annulment or defend Ani’s rights. He will do as he is told and do it in Russia. Toros arranges some compensation for her, which she accepts but doesn’t really think about, and she flies back to New York to spend a last night in the mansion, watched over by Igor. Throughout the film he has played the nice guy among the bad guys. I’m not sure Baker believes this role exists outside of the movies, but it certainly matches his repeatedly offered idea, present in his earlier films and in his conversations, that work we are supposed to disapprove of, like lap dancing or organised crime, is still work and deserves some sort of respect. Ani ought to be on Baker’s side in this debate, but her sense of herself at the end of the story, before Igor drops her off at her old home in Brighton Beach, is entirely bleak, devoid of colour, as if her life will notionally continue but is really over. What has happened? Where has she been?