It has been about a week since I saw this latest film from Sean Baker (The Florida Project) and I still feel suffused with its sad beauty.

What I think Sean Baker is really good at, apart from focusing films on fascinating female characters who live on the margins, is keeping the audience uncomfortable as he hovers between comedy and pathos. 

Anora (Mikey Madison), or Ani as she prefers to be called, is a sex worker in Brooklyn who gets one of those ‘dream’ opportunities to be the girlfriend of the son of a Russian oligarch. It feels like being plucked from obscurity and we can see she is no naïf, aware what her role is and that it is to be placator and pleasing and always up for fun and sex. Her client is Ivan (Mark Eydelshteyn), and it is clear that he is young, dumb and entitled, living a life of excess and always protected from accountability by his rather fearsome parents. He has been called back to Russia to join the family business and this is his final party before serious adult life begins.

When they fly on a whim to Las Vegas, his drunken and coked up crackpot idea that they get married so that he can have a green card and stay in America seems to Ani to be a way out of the drudgery of endless lap dances in the club where she works. We know it’s not going to end well and it doesn’t take long for Ivan’s minders to descend on them to try and sort out the problem.

This is where the discomfort starts, particularly the scene where the Russian minders try and control Ani. It is kept light, almost played for laughs with their bumbling and ineptitude and her feisty fierceness and I could tell the audience’s instinct was to laugh but in the pit of your stomach you know you’re watching a woman being assaulted.

It becomes something of a neon-lit late night caper with Ani and the thugs searching the dark and grimy corners of New York for Ivan who, of course, has run out on his responsibilities. Some scenes seem to be filmed in the chaos of real clubs and restaurants, and we really feel the cold emptiness of the city.

Madison is perfect as Ani – she is spunky and sexy and believably vulnerable. Baker never lets her sink into victimhood or shifts the focus from her although it is only at the end that we get to see behind her mask. The ending – which may be controversial or have different interpretations – for me finally let us understand who she was. 

There are hints of an attraction between her and one of the thugs Igor (Yura Borisov) – or rather from him. I liked the way it was handled and that Ani’s future was defined by more than her relationships with men.