‘Anora’ Disguises Its Moral Center in a Swirl of Exuberance and Mayhem

Anora, like almost every film ever made about a sex worker, is a fable of power and freedom. Writer-director Sean Baker’s great triumph is concealing the story’s somewhat inevitable Marxist moral in an entertaining swirl of comic exuberance and manic mayhem.

Until, that is, the main character’s heartbreaking revelation literally at the last minute, in a sequence so stunningly executed by actress and director that it transforms the entire movie.

Anora (opening Friday, Oct. 25 in the Bay Area) spans a month or so in the life of a 23-year-old exotic (i.e., lap) dancer at the top of her game. Mikey Madison portrays Ani with a convincing blend of after-hours swagger, rough-edge New York attitude and, under that crusty/smooth veneer, a streak of naiveté.

Ani, you see, thinks she’s in complete control of her situation. She uses her power — sex, that is — to make a good living, then mocks her customers’ compliance after they leave. She argues and negotiates with the club owner as if they’re equals (or she’s a superstar, like Aaron Judge) rather than his employee.

Baker (Tangerine, The Florida Project, Red Rocket) skillfully walks a tightrope between two simplistic audience reactions. We aren’t encouraged to bask voyeuristically in Mikey’s hot nocturnal playground nor do we view her with the condescension of world-wise adults who know (from the movies, if not real life) that sex work is a grinding downward spiral.

Instead we see Ani as someone who has yet to learn what every woman who’s ever waited tables or mixed a drink knows: At the end of the day, the person with the money has the power. If you’re working for tips, you’re going to swallow some crap. To pretend otherwise is delusional.

Perhaps Ani harbors another pipe dream, that a well-off customer will woo her and take her out of the life. Rest assured that Baker doesn’t venture into Pretty Woman territory, nor does he suggest that marriage can be a kinder, gentler variation of prostitution. We’re firmly in the post-feminist, girls-just-want-to-have-fun-on-their-own-terms world. (I suspect the Cannes jury gave Anora the Palme d’Or for its portrait of contemporary female independence in tandem with its depiction of capitalism gone wild.)

Ani does win the lottery, in a manner of speaking, only the customer isn’t some divorced middle-aged guy but an immature Russian a few years younger than her. Ivan (Mark Eydelshteyn) has an even more compressed world view than Ani: Ensconced in his parents’ gated house with a bottomless allowance, he doesn’t look beyond his next video-game session or drug-fueled party.

Anora envelops the viewer as well, in a succession of fantasy interiors: the purplish men’s club, an over-the-top Las Vegas hotel suite, the opulent isolation of Ivan’s house. We know that none of it is real, but Ani revels in every setting. If you’re thinking that Cyndi Lauper has passed the turntable to Tina Turner (what’s love got to do with it?), well, Baker has a twist for you.

What happened in Vegas doesn’t stay in Vegas, and Ivan’s parents are seriously displeased. They dispatch minions to the mansion, and for a few minutes it appears we’ve segued to the dangerous (and darkly funny) world of the Safdie brothers (Good Time, Uncut Gems) where minor miscreants find themselves on the wrong side of very, very bad people.

Violence is not in the offing, thankfully. But for Ani, who’s held captive and physically restrained — lest she destroy every piece of expensive bric-a-brac and art — nothing is worse than being denied her freedom. And her autonomy, for she insists on her and Ivan’s commitment to each other.

Anora isn’t a Preston Sturges-style parable of conning a rube for money and unexpectedly falling in love. It’s hard to imagine Mikey Madison, who gives a wildly go-for-broke performance, as a calculating Barbara Stanwyck type. She’s a china-smashing bull in this fervid second half, where the movie becomes an upside-down comedy of manners with Ani the working-class outsider trampling the social order and rules with a remarkable steadfastness, purity and defiance.

In transforming this powerless girl, a sex worker of no status and little education, into the film’s moral center, Baker has made a genuinely subversive work. The great pleasure and perhaps greater accomplishment of Anora is that it doesn’t play at any point as social commentary. Ani has no agenda beyond (and no higher stakes than) her continued independence, and Baker and Madison keep us riveted on that.

Ani’s last-minute breakdown/breakthrough, in which she sees how she uses sex in every relationship to communicate and control, is as personal as it gets. And yet, as vital and au courant as Anora is, I expect it will be pushed out of the year-end awards conversation by the unusually large number of “serious” movies coming our way in the next couple months.

Serious being a relative term, of course. I doubt that Ani has read The Great Gatsby, but she would recognize her paramour in it.

“They were careless people,” F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote a century ago, “Tom and Daisy — they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”

‘Anora’ opens in Bay Area theaters on Friday, Oct. 25.