‘Anora’: Wild Sex Worker Cinderella Story Just Dazzled Cannes

Sometimes it feels like an actor has just been waiting for their breakout moment: Mikey Madison just had hers at the Cannes Film Festival. She has been good for a long time in projects like Better Things, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, and Scream. (In both of the latter titles she, bizarrely, played a crazed villain who was ultimately lit on fire. She has a great scream.)

But she has never quite had a role like the title character in Sean Baker’s Anora, a twisted fairy tale about a sex worker who impulsively marries the son of a Russian oligarch. The film is very funny, until it punches you in the gut with a beautiful ending, and it entirely rests on Madison’s performance as the tough-as-nails Anora.

Anora, however, goes by Ani, when we first meet her through a series of lap dances at the midtown strip club where she works. That night her boss tells her to go meet with Ivan (Mark Eydelshteyn), a gangly Russian patron, who wants her for a dance because she speaks his language. He’s infatuated, they hit it off, and she gives him her number. When they first meet up for sex, he reveals his family’s riches, and after inviting her to a rager of a New Year’s Eve party, he pays her $15,000 to be his girlfriend for a week, in which they party, run around Coney Island, and go to Vegas. It’s all like a semi-sordid dream for her. He showers her with affection and lets her live in his lavish world. And then, in Sin City, he proposes. She says yes.

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