Anora: Screwball Tragicomedy

A respectful goon. The kind of henchman who pulls out your chair at dinner. A bald man, sheepish and charmingly incompetent. He’s the kid on the team who pinch hits in the bottom of the ninth of the big game because everyone else has broken all their bones sliding into various bases. He hits a single, and, even though your team loses 7-2, you hoist him up on your shoulders. Next week he’ll be back in the dugout picking his nose. But in this glorious moment, his dingbat charm has become brilliance.

About halfway through Anora (2024) when Sean Baker introduced the hapless respectful goon Igor (Yura Borisov), I knew I loved the film. Throughout its runtime, Anora straddles the line between farce and tragedy. She (Mikey Madison) is a, uh, a dancer of the exotic variety. She twerks on malformed Manhattan dads for tips. Maybe more is involved—who’s to say? She lives in Brighton Beach, enjoying a tenuous connection to her own Russian heritage. She can understand the language but not speak it. Certainly, her prince charming, Ivan “Vanya” Zakharov (Mark Eydelshteyn)—an oligarchic princeling from Moscow—offers her an opportunity to connect with her background. He also represents a potential way out, an escape from living on the margins (of society and of the city itself).

His parents and their henchmen are not so charmed. When Anora and Vanya marry after he agrees to pay her for her company over a week, they explode. Long strings of untranslated Russian punctuated by prostitutka abound. We know their love is young, dumb, and doomed. Vanya just plays video games and smokes weed all day; he can’t be bothered to put on a shirt or socks. Yet, Anora seems like a fundamentally decent, if wounded, person, naïve but not stupid. We want her to succeed, even as we see the fall coming.

Then Igor comes around. Tasked by Vanya’s parents’ Armenian-American middleman with restraining this feisty Brooklyn stripper, he finds it nearly impossible to do so without implying sexual fascination. Tying her up with a phone cord? Come on. Holding her hands behind her back? Come on. His fumbling embarrasses him, and yet he never snaps. Imagine that—a calm goon, a goon averse to violence, a goon who is a fundamentally non-sexual creature. The prudish goon, the timorous henchman.

From that point, the move is pure Billy Wilder, pure screwball. It’s all screaming and pratfalls, foibles left and right. Imagine Uncut Gems (2019) with a female protagonist, and you’re getting close to the idea. That Baker sticks the landing, keeping the comedy and the inherent tragedy of the story balanced, is a testament to his abilities as a director. Mikey Madison steals the show too, though I’m sorry to say her New York accent occasionally lapses into a Philadelphia snarl.

As I understand it, it’s unfashionable to like Anora too much for any number of reasons: it’s not as good as Baker’s other movies (haven’t seen them); it takes sex work insufficiently seriously (do people actually think everyone engaged in that sort of thing is doing it for self-consciously political liberatory purposes?); perhaps it’s just “too popular,” always a sure way to bring out the haters (usually, I am one!).

But Anora just plain made sense to me. I have known many “Anoras.” Maybe not from Brighton Beach. But in East New York, in the New Jersey exurbs and suburbs where I grew up there are many working-class women, naïve but not stupid, who look for the work they can get, who want to do well for themselves but are up against nearly impossible odds. Who can blame them for praying for a Russian gamer with enough money to smother King Midas to come along? They make crude jokes and smoke cigarettes and vape pens with their coworkers outside their places of business. Their rivals haunt the same strip clubs and fight with them over tips; the “c word” gets thrown around. And, unfortunately, as with Anora herself, things usually don’t work out for them, at least not as they had hoped.

Tragicomedy is no easy thing. But it lightens the blow and preserves hope where there would be nothing but despair. For Sean Baker’s commitment to lightening our load, for his deployment of the respectful goon, I am thankful.