Anora review: ‘Romeo and Juliet with more sex and drugs’

Anora

18 | ★★★★★

One of the best films of the year makes stars of two rising Jewish talents. The movie sees Mark Eidleshtein, who has been described as a Russian Timothée Chalamet, play Vanya, the loose-canon teenage son of oligarchs. The boychick has turned his absent parents’ mansion on Brooklyn’s Brighton Beach into a party house.

Eidelshtein’s endearingly immature teen is every inch the carefree spoilt offspring of the insanely rich. He is a boy who chases fun, sex and vice the way other kids his age chase a football.

However, it is the performance by American actress Mickey Madison that is unforgettable here. In the title role of director Sean Baker’s raw delve into the underbelly of Manhattan sex clubs and Brooklyn’s Russian émigré community Madison’s Anora is one of several seemingly fearless, endlessly savvy escort girls who gyrate in front of dead-pan seated middle-aged men.

Like the customers Baker’s camera does not look away, even if there are moments when you wish it did. We first encounter Vanya during his visit to the club. He wants a girl who speaks Russian. Anora does because, she explains, her grandmother couldn’t speak English.

The relationship between these two is always transactional and the context in which it is formed, unremittingly sordid. But like a poppy on a highway it blossoms into something unexpectedly sweet. Comparisons have been made with Pretty Woman. But really the sheer youthful impetuousness of Vanya and Ani (as she prefers to be known) is more Romeo and Juliet only with more sex and drugs.

They get married in Vegas and you wait for the inevitable reality check. When it arrives it takes the film to unexpected directions and emotions, driven by the boy’s hapless, increasingly desperate minders who attempt to annul the marriage before the scary parents land their private jet.

The film, which won a Palm d’Or at Cannes builds expectations of Russian gangsterism. But it is much more interested in the comedy of errors begat by human nature and is all the better for that. And with every frame she is on screen Madison’s Anora charges the film with a presence that is as streetwise as it is tender. It is the performance of the year.