Welcome to How Gay Is It?Out's review series where, using our state-of-the-art Eggplant Rating System, we determine just how queer some of pop culture's buzziest films and TV shows are! (Editor's note: this post contains spoilers for Neon's Anora.)
When movies like Sean Baker’s Anora are in theaters, you know awards season has officially begun!
The film stars young actress Mikey Madison (Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Scream) as Ani, an exotic dancer at a club in Brighton Beach, New York. One night, a disgustingly rich young man named Vanya (Mark Eidelstein) comes into the club asking for a girl who speaks Russian. Ani is that girl.
She soon becomes his favorite dancer, enough so that he hires her for a whole week. Not wanting his time with her to end, Vanya proposes marriage, and flies Ani and his friends out to Vegas to make her his beaming bride.
Life's a party of drugs, booze, dancing, video games, and sex until Vanya's Russian Oligarch parents find out about the marriage and send Vanya's handler to make sure Ani and Vanya get an annulment.
Madison and Eidelstein bring hilarious performances that deliver on the laughs in this movie that is much funnier than its premise would have you think. The one place where Eidelstein falters is in his chaotic use of a video game controller. We're supposed to believe he's a 21 year old son of an oligarch who spends all his time getting high and playing video games, yet he mashes the buttons on his controller like he's never seen it before.
Ani is strong and proud, a classic New York girl moving at a frenetic and sexy pace as she tries to hold onto her marriage, her dignity, and her money.
It's no wonder Madison is one of the hottest rising stars in Hollywood. Every decision she makes here is utterly perfect. She brings the heat to dialogue, silent moments, and her physicality, making it an immersive performance.
Baker is cementing himself as one of the best actors' directors in Hollywood. With Anora sure to get Madison some awards attention, each of his last four movies will have put actors in that position.
Both Kitana Kiki Rodriguez and Mya Taylor were nominated for Independent Spirit Awards and Gotham Awards for Tangerine, with Taylor winning both; Willem Dafoe earned Oscar and Golden Globe nominations for The Florida Project; and Simon Rex won the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, Independent Spirit Award, and other awards for Red Rocket. Actors should be scrambling to be in Baker's next film.
Like those previous projects, this one also focuses on the lives of sex workers, and does a great job at showing respect to the profession and its participants.
It also reminds me a lot of a film I saw at Sundance, Ponyboi. That movie is also about a thickly-accented east coast sex worker (from New Jersey in that movie's case) who goes on a mad dash through their city in one frenetic night. I hope River Gallo's transcendent performance in that movie is not overlooked when it gets a release because of its similarities to Madison's in this film. Now, as Out loves to ask: how gay is it?
While Anora is all about sex workers, there’s not really much queerness. The scheduler at the club Ani works at is a lesbian, but other than that the movie is pretty straight. Three and a half out of five stars overall, and one out of five eggplants on Out's scale.
Anora is in theaters now.
