Sean Baker’s Palm d’Or-winning drama Anora has taken the critical world by storm, making it a kind of culmination of the indie auteur’s multi-decade body of work about marginalized characters and socio-economic plight. And, in that regard, it is a notable work, one that pushes boundaries, skirts genre expectations, and puts front and center the kind of social desperation and disdain that is so often sidelined (or sentimentalized) in Hollywood fare. The characters to whom Baker is drawn are usually, at best, fringe dwellers or supporting figures who would exist only to add “color” in mainstream cinema. Starting with his sophomore film Take Out (2004), Baker has favored stories about immigrants, hustlers, and sex workers, with financial desperation being one of the key themes uniting his films. He wants us to feel his characters’ plight, rather than use it as accoutrement, and there is nobility in that. The problem with Anora is that, despite its good intentions, it feels false at virtually every turn. There are moments of palpable reality and dramatic punch, but it is fundamentally contrived in all the worst ways, which bleeds it of the authenticity that is its raison d’etre.

The title character of Anora is Anora Mihkeeva, New Jersey stripper and escort who goes by the name Ani (Mikey Madison). When we meet her, it is clear that she is tough and damaged, working at a high-end club only because it is the only option available to her (if she has hopes and dreams of something else, we never hear about it). While she wields a certain level of power in the dark with her clients, at the end of the day she is answerable to the club’s manager, in constant competition with the other strippers, and only able to eek out a meager existence in an apartment by the train tracks that she shares with a discontented roommate.

In a kind of dark twist on the Hollywood romance Pretty Woman (1990), the first half of the film focuses on the relationship between Ani and Vanya (Mark Eydelshteyn), a wealthy Russian partyboy who is looking for a good time at the club with his friends. Ani’s manager assigns her to Vanya because her parents are Russian immigrants and therefore she speaks some Russian. They have a good time, and at the end of the night he asks to see her again. The next day she arrives at his monstrous-modernist mansion overlooking the coast for a sexual tryst. He is eager and kind of silly (his tousled hair and rack-thin body are those of a child), but he is also clearly loaded, which makes him appealing enough.

After a few more hook-ups, Vanya offers to pay Ani $10,000 to be his girlfriend for a week. After some haggling, she accepts, and they party with his friends, snort cocaine, copulate in various positions and locations, party some more, and travel to Vegas, where Vanya unexpectedly pitches the idea of their getting married. Although initially reluctant, Ani gives in to the fantasy, and soon they are at a Vegas chapel, saying their drunken-stoned nuptials and becoming man and wife. For Ani, this is an unexpected dream-come-true because not only does it allow her to throw off the shackles of working as a stripper, but she is now swimming in obscene wealth.

The nuptials do not sit well with Vanya’s Russian oligarch parents (Aleksei Serebryakov and Darya Ekamasova), who immediately get on a plane to set things right. However, they first send in their “fixer,” an Armenian priest named Toros (Karren Karagulian), who shows up with his brother, Garnick (Vache Tovmasyan), and a Russian thug named Igor (Yura Borisov) who functions as Vanya’s father’s muscle. Vanya initially tries to keep them out, but when it becomes clear that they are there at the behest of his father and that they are not leaving, he takes off, literally running away and leaving Ani in tears, confused, and in the grasp of his father’s men. The second half of the film—which drags on and on and on—is like a riff on Martin Scorsese’s After Hours (1986), as Toros, Garnick, and Igor haul Ani along with them on a delirious odyssey through various businesses and restaurants and clubs in the dark, freezing-cold streets of New Jersey as they attempt to track down Vanya. Baker plays the whole situation as both tragedy and farce, with Toros and the other Russian goons’ obvious incompetence undercutting any real dramatic tension.

As the film progresses, it becomes clear that Baker’s narrative is dishonest, as it requires Ani to continue insisting on the legitimacy of her marriage to Vanya long after it has been made clear to everyone around her (and us) that there is nothing there. All of Ani’s actions and dialogue suggest that she is genuinely committed to Vanya and wants to reconnect with him to preserve their marriage even though everything he has done and everything we have seen between them suggests nothing more than a relationship of convenience. Had Baker given them even a single scene in which they connect via something others other than drugs, alcohol, sex, and partying, we might somehow understand her desire to see him again (outside of just wanting to be part of his monied world). Unfortunately, the film gives us nothing in that regard (the closest Ani and Vanya get to connection outside of humping is her cuddling on his chest while he distractedly plays video games), which makes Ani seem desperate and pathetic—the very antithesis of what she is supposed to be.

While there is room to understand a dislocated character who is caught up in the headiness of the moment, everything about Ani suggests that she is smart, practical, and self-aware—precisely the kind of character who would know exactly when to cut and run. Vanya has literally run away like a petulant child and refuses to answer his phone, thus leaving her in the hands of his father’s fixer and muscle—in other words, done everything to demonstrate that he does not care for her in any meaningful way. Yet, she keeps pressing on the idea that if she can just talk to him, the elusive truth of their marriage will be made clear, which at first plays as desperation on the part of a character who has been suddenly and unexpectedly thrown into one of life’s worst grinders, but eventually just begins to grate because we can’t imagine that she is this obtuse. Critics have praised Mikey Madison’s performance, but it struck me as a one-note screech against the obviousness of an ugly reality.

When Ani is finally reunited with Vanya and is being forced onto a plane with his parents so they can fly to Vegas to annul the marriage, she tries to convince him to step off the plane and leave with her, thus preserving their union but leaving behind everything else. For lack of anything better to say, he blurts out, “Are you stupid?,” which I gather is supposed to ring as a harsh revelation of Vanya’s grossly deficient character, but for me felt like vindication for what I had been feeling for the better part of an hour. How does someone who is otherwise so smart, so self-sufficient, so confident in herself maintain such an embarrassing delusion with this narcissistic, tousled-haired man-child? If Baker had given Ani half the self-awareness she deserves, then Anora would have earned the praise it has garnered.

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