The funny, chaotic, tender Anora is Cinderella with sex workers

Anora is far more a fairytale than any of its director Sean Baker’s past portraits of sex workers. Starlet, Tangerine, The Florida Project, Red Rocket – at times, they can be a little sentimental, but they’re deeply and affectionately embedded in their respective worlds. Anora, however, imagines a stripper Cinderella if she knew her dream was propped up by nothing but vape fumes and G-strings. She holds on, because who wouldn’t? Yet even the faintest of breaths will cause the whole castle to come crumbling down.

The princess here is Ani (Mikey Madison). Her full name is Anora, but like her Uzbek heritage and use of spoken Russian, it’s a part of her that she tries to conceal behind a customer service smile and maternal attentiveness – all necessary to play the part of the friendly American stripper. Such projected confidence makes her immediately attractive to Vanya (Mark Eydelshteyn), son of a Russian oligarch, with cash practically falling out of his pockets. He pays for a dance, then sex, then a week-long “girlfriend experience”.

But she’s fond of him. Looking like a Russian Timothée Chalamet, he’s a string-trap of boyishness – his seduction technique is to backflip onto the bed in nothing but socks and tighty-whities, and he likes to crack jokes with the hotel concierges, who smile back and then turn inwardly with an expression of absolute exasperation.

Sure, he’s obnoxious, but you get the sense Ani sees in him the innocence she’s never afforded. What they share isn’t quite a romance, but an admission of mutual benefit. So, they get hitched. Ani gets financial security and sex with somebody she likes, and Vanya a green card and a new way to piss off his parents.

Baker’s films don’t typically have all that much to say about the political reality of sex workers’ lives, and there’s little here beyond Ani’s reminder to her boss that she won’t be forced to work without the health insurance and pension benefits of a full-time employee. But his interests seem to lie more in centring sex work – often precarious, sometimes extremely profitable – as part of the modern American mythology, a new iteration of the western cowboy. Anora is a small film that feels much larger, elevated by humour, chaos, and human tenderness.

When Vanya’s parents catch wind of the marriage, they send in their henchmen: two Armenian brothers, Toros (Karren Karagulian) and Garnick (Vache Tovmasyan), and the Russian Igor (Yura Borisov). What starts as a fierce physical confrontation, then descends into a panic, before softening into begrudging respect. It’s as if you shot up the hapless enforcers of a Coen Brothers comedy with the adrenaline of Uncut Gems. They’re well-meaning guys, at the end of the day, and only trying to save their own skins.

Madison takes a character trained by life to always pounce – on an opportunity or a threat – and subtly, but consistently, reveals to us her softness and her soul. That’s the work that will win the actor, previously known for Once Upon a Time in Hollywood and 2022’s Scream, awards; her natural, champagne-bubble magnetism is what may very well turn her into a star.

Borisov is extraordinary, too. Igor is a quiet one, but his loneliness is palpable, and he helps land Anora’s final moments with the force of a mic drop. And so, we’re left to contemplate this single, somewhat uncomfortable thought: when all that matters is making money, how do you differentiate between what you do for survival and what you do for your own happiness?

Dir: Sean Baker. Starring: Mikey Madison, Mark Eydelshteyn, Yura Borisov, Karren Karagulian, Vache Tovmasyan, Aleksei Serebryakov. 18, 139 mins.

‘Anora’ is in cinemas from 1 November