ANORA: a triumph, or just the return of T&A?
Sean Baker’s latest film took both Cannes and the critics by storm, but is it a real future classic, or a case of the Empress’s new clothes? Anora answers that question literally in its first moments. The Empress is pretty much naked. Opening in the strip club where its heroine Ani (Mikey Madison) works, there’s not much in the way of female clothing on show. A soundtrack of a Take That song does add an amusing counterpoint; the sensible tones of Gary Barlow were never meant to be the backdrop for dimly-lit crotch grinding and hair-flicking. There’s a good chunk of this before the film’s gritty-Pretty-Woman, postmodern Cinderella storyline kicks in: there’s a customer who wants a girl who can speak Russian, which Ani can. More grinding and a private housecall later, we discover that the Russian customer is Ivan (Mark Eydelshteyn), a young oligarch’s son let loose in New York. At this point, the storyline switches to a sleazy iteration of an early-2000s teen comedy, all parties, adventu...