ANORA ***
IDEA: A Brooklyn escort thinks she's got it made when she marries the son of a Russian oligarch, but her situation takes a turn for the worse when his irate family orchestrates plans to annul the marriage.
BLURB: Anora is a raucous, often stomach-churning rollercoaster of moods and emotions, a film that throws the trappings of a screwball comedy over a nightmare about class inequality, capitalist corruption, and the social constraints on female agency. The discombobulating trajectory of the film largely stems from the structure of Baker’s screenplay. After a curiously aloof, montage-heavy first third, which alluringly but somewhat tritely sketches the quixotic Cinderella story of Mikey Madison’s titular sex worker, Baker stages a post-honeymoon crash that hits the viewer like a ton of bricks. Whatever naïve romantic euphoria he had generated totally evaporates in the cold light of the mansion where Ani is assaulted, coerced, and kidnapped by a trio of pugilistic male goons. There is humor to said goons’ flailing incompetency, but the overall affect of this excruciatingly protracted sequence is one of suffocation, a feeling Anora will sustain through an ensuing, increasingly grim comedy of errors in which Ani is strong-armed by a man whose social power affords him a mobility and imperviousness she will likely never see. Baker and Madison prevent Ani from ever being a simple victim of circumstance - her sharp tongue, stubbornness, and tenacity ensure that - but the script is disappointingly uninterested with her inner-life, even as it builds to an emotional conclusion. Perhaps that’s part of the point of Baker’s twisted tale, where people are treated as commodities and relationships follow the logic of financial transactions, and where one’s soul can only be bared when there seems to be nothing left to lose.