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It isn’t, though. Alas, Ivan is merely the idiot son, to quote the Handsome Furs, of Russian Oligarchs, and upon learning of his sudden marriage, they dispatch two Armenian thugs, Toros (Karren Karagulian) and Garnik (Vache Tovmasyan), and one Russian thug, Igor (Yura Borisov), to round up the newlyweds and annul the union. An Armenian Orthodox priest, Toros is literally summoned in the middle of a baptism, suggesting money always comes before God. The job proves more difficult than expected, however, when Ivan flees, going on a bender of strip clubs, sort of the idiot son’s version of running away home. His jilted wife and his peeved pursuers, then, form an unlikely quartet, at once aligned and in opposition, chasing Ivan across Brooklyn as a “Pretty Woman”-like fantasy recalibrates as a black-hearted comedy.
Indeed, though “Anora” is an independent, it often feels transplanted from Hollywood’s Golden Age, like 90 years ago this might have been a vehicle for Mae West. There is a distinct screwball energy to the chase scenes, in ways both big and small, in the out-and-out angry desperation effused by Karragulianas as Toros, and in the dumplings Garnik uses to nurse a wound in lieu of ice. Yet, at the same time, Baker’s editing is not always fast-paced, lingering on the real menace in the air, as in the sequence where Garnik and Igor try to corral the scrappy Ani. It’s deliberately and effectively unsettling; I kept laughing and then I kept feeling guilty for laughing.
Ultimately, though, “Anora” is not quite as difficult nor revelatory as these tangled sensations would suggest. True, there is something moving in the emergent Alice/Uncas like relationship of Ani and Igor, two physical laborers in their respective ways, proletariats under the thumb of the bourgeoisie. But the class commentary is not as nimbly sewn into the plot as a Golden Age comedy and what’s more never cuts all that deep, as obvious as the divide between Ani’s house beneath the train tracks and Ivan’s on the water. When Toros gives a maid a bigger-than-usual tip to clean up Ivan’s bigger-than-usual mess, the capping shot of the maid is as funny as it is revealing, the movie itself treating her as Toros does, uninterested in her plight, abandoning her just as he does.
“Anora” is not uninterested in Ani’s plight, obviously, it’s front and center, but it also never entirely brings her to life. Madison’s performance is lively, often incredibly so, but that is not quite the same thing. And by rendering “Anora” so plot-forward, Baker essentially yokes his characters to it, rarely stopping to have them explicate ideas or thoughts, meaning that any sense of character is what the actors bring. Maybe that’s less important with the secondary people but it’s a significant flaw where Ani is concerned. And for all of Madison’s energy, who Ani truly is and how she feels is much less clear, underlined in how we never quite know if she’s really in love with Ivan and going after him on blind faith, or if she’s hoping to ultimately play his family for a big payday. Maybe she doesn’t know herself, but if so, that inner struggle does not emerge, and it means what would be an utterly brutal punch of a denouement only half-connects.
