Producers: Alex Coco, Samantha Quan and Sean Baker  Director: Sean Baker   Screenplay: Sean Baker    Cast: Mikey Madison, Mark Eydelshteyn, Yura Borisov, Karren Karagulian, Vache Tovmasyan, Darya Ekamasova, Aleksey Serebryakov, Lindsey Normington, Ivy Wolk, Luna Sofia Miranda, Alena Gurevich, Sebastian Conelli and Ella Rubin  Distributor: Neon   

Grade: B+

The classic screwball comedies were a bit naughty, even mildly risqué.  Sean Baker’s modern take on the genre leaves any hint of restraint in the dust.  “Anora” is extravagantly sexy, foul-mouthed and, up to the closing few minutes, utterly cynical about romance.  It’s replete with drug humor, violence and the most sordid goings-on.  It’s also structurally a mess: it repeats the same beats over and over again, at inordinate length, and individual sequences are so shapeless and meandering that they often feel like sloppy, poorly edited improvisations. 

But despite the manifest flaws in execution and the avalanche of raunchiness, “Anora” is lively and fun.  It’s actually formulaic, but has a vibrancy that makes it seem fresh.  Unlike most comedies today, it has real verve and spirit.  It’s overlong—a great 100-minute movie trapped in a very good 140-minute one—but still compulsively watchable.    

And it has a breakthrough lead performance by Mikey Madison as Anora “Ani” Mikheeva, a pole dancer/escort at a Manhattan strip club who lives in a nothing flat with a roommate (Ella Rubin).  She has friends at work, like fellow dancer Lulu (Luna Sofía Miranda), but also enemies, particularly Diamond (Lindsey Normington), who accuses her of poaching her clients.     

Ani is pragmatic, offering her services freely to the customers by inviting them to one of the private rooms for a personal session.  It’s while doing that one night that she meets Ivan “Vanya” Zakharov (Mark Eydelshteyn), a wealthy young Russian with apparently insatiable appetites, the very embodiment of the unbridled ID.  She’s steered to him by the boss because she knows some Russian, learned from the grandma she lived with. 

They click, and after a couple of sessions Vanya offers Ani a proposition: come and stay with him for a week, and he’ll pay her ten grand.  After getting him to increase the sum to fifteen, she shows up at his magnificent Brooklyn estate, where they settle into a routine of sultry sex—very explicitly shown—raucous parties, and lots of drugs and alcohol.  When she asks him where his money comes from, he first jokes that he’s a drug lord, but then admits he’s the son of a powerful oligarch, and when Ani googles the name, she’s astonished. 

But by this time it’s become clear than Ani isn’t just a mercenary; she’s also a bit of a romantic, and when Vanya suggests that they and his crew take an impromptu trip to Las Vegas, she agrees.  And when he proposes to her there, she accepts and gets a marriage license and four-carat ring in the process.  The whole thing feels like a flashy, sexy modern Cinderella story—or maybe a hotter contemporary version of “Pretty Woman.”  And it’s made exciting by director-editor Baker’s rowdy, hyper-energetic style and the glitziness of the locations used by production designer Stephen Phelps and shot by Drew Daniels in gritty, color-splashed tones.

But things change when they return to the New York mansion and are visited by a couple of thuggish enforcers, Garnick (Vache Tovmasyan) and Igor (Yura Borisov), who have been assigned to ensure that Vanya doesn’t get in to too much trouble.  When they find out that he’s married a sex worker, matters get out of control, and Vanya flees while the duo hold Ani prisoner and call their boss Toros (Karren Karagulian), whom they interrupt in the middle of a family event.  Storming over to the house, he tries to calm the situation down—by this time Ani has been trussed up and is screaming rape—and enlists her in helping them track down her husband.  Toros also has the unpleasant task of notifying his employer, Vanya’s father Nikolai (Aleksey Serebryakov) of what’s happened, and the oligarch and his domineering wife Galina (Darya Ekamasova) quickly hop aboard a plane in Moscow to come to the States.

Meanwhile it’s Toros’ task to get the marriage annulled despite Ani’s protestations.  But to do so, he must first find Vanya, which occasions visits to various clubs and other places—like the Coney Island candy shop where Ani’s friend Crystal (Ivy Wolk) covers the cash register—to search for him.  Finally they do, but an effort to secure the annulment in a compliant New York court unravels because of Vanya’s inebriated condition—and the fact that the ceremony occurred in Nevada.

This second act of the film has the feel of a Hollywood fable about comic gangsters—“Pocketful of Miracles,” say—turned darker, with bursts of bleak humor infusing prolonged action that’s not far from sexual brutality, a long night’s odyssey through a demimonde of desperate pleasure-seeking, and a courtroom sequence that almost goes off the rails.  It’s here that “Anora” feels most padded and repetitious, and where some judicious pruning would have helped.  Yet there are moments one would hate to do without—an altercation with a tow-truck driver (Sebastian Conelli), for instance, or a tantrum in which Toros berates a table of dismissive young men in a diner for their lack of a proper work ethic.

The final reel turns the Cinderella story on its head when Nikolai and Galina arrive and Vanya proves a submissive kid totally in his mother’s thrall.  Ani gets a payoff, and the pleasure of standing up to the nasty Galina—which amuses Nikolai to no end—but the dream of a happy marriage she actually embraced is destroyed.  Baker doesn’t let matters end on such a completely sour note, though: a closing farewell between Ani and the sensitive Igor suggests that something more might be in the offing.

“Anora” isn’t entirely successful in blending its various tones, and it does feel overstuffed, with digressions suggesting that Baker was reluctant to abandon any of his inspirations, or leave anything on the cutting-room floor.  But the lead performances are terrific.  Madison is hard-boiled, seductive or sad, as the occasion demands, and Borisov makes Igor a soulful fellow forced to do things he’d rather not.  And Eydelshteyn encapsulates first the uninhibited hedonism of a privileged youngster freed of parental control, and later the pathetic weakness of a kid cowed by his harridan of a mother.  Then there’s Karagulian’s frantic Toros, a guy raging with self-pity over how his minions have failed him.  Among the others Tovmasyan has some nice moments as a guy who gets no respect, Ekamasova is the very image of an arrogant, entitled wife and mother, and Serebryakov exudes the weariness of a man as exhausted by his wife’s dominance as her son is.

“Anora” isn’t perfect, but its exuberance and willingness to take risks make for a gleefully tough, and ultimately rather poignant, portrait of a young woman seduced and abandoned.

Producers: Matīss Kaža, Gints Zilbalodis, Ron Dyens and Gregory Zalcman   Director: Gints Zilbalodis Screenplay: Gints Zilbalodis and Matīss Kaža    Distributor: Sideshow/Janus Films

Grade: B+

Latvian director Gints Zilbalodis’ entrancing animated film begins with a shot of a slinky gray feline with enormous eyes staring at its reflection in a clear stream.  It ends with the cat doing so again, but this time it’s not alone: a dog, a capybara and a lemur stand beside it, scanning their reflections as well. 

How they came to be together represents the trajectory of “Flow.” Stunning animation marks this wordless, though hardly soundless, tale of a journey taken by a motley assortment of animals through a world that is apparently undergoing a second deluge of biblical proportions.  Not to worry, though: the humans are already nowhere to be seen, though the structures they left behind—rustic houses, flats that rise up like mountains, and statues of enormous size—remain.

Many of those statues are, for some reason, of cats, which perhaps perplexes the one we meet in the first scene admiring itself, as well as us viewers until the feline comes upon a woodcarver’s cabin with a well-used studio, littered with designs for such cat-centered structures left behind by the owner, where it promptly goes to sleep. 

The tranquility is shattered the following morning first by a pack of dogs chasing a rabbit, and then by the thunderous racket of a herd of deer bounding through the woods, their panic occasioned by a flood that sends a wall of water through the forest.  The cat scrambles atop the highest sculpture, notices the dogs in a boat being carried along by the waves, and then manages to hop onto a passing sailboat, where he meets the capybara, a gentle lummox.

That’s just the first of the critters to join what becomes a kind of crew.  A solitary lemur, collecting shiny bric-a-brac in a basket, is virtually forced to come aboard, and a golden Labrador retriever, separated from the pack, scuttles on deck as well.  Finally, there’s a haughty but empathetic white secretarybird which, after suffering an injury to its wing in protecting the cat from the more aggressive leader of its flock, hops aboard too.  Assuming a sort of captaincy, it takes charge of the rudder and steers the craft through the channels of a deserted city of houses that appear to have been carved out of beige stone, and past a huge amphitheater swarming with lemurs.

And yet it’s the cat who remains primus inter pares, holding our attention as it falls repeatedly into the water, in the process learning to swim without fear and scooping up the fish that it encounters in the luminous blue current.  Those underwater sequences are especially ravishing, but so are those above the waves, where a whale proves a helpful friend at one of the feline’s moments of greatest peril.  It will reappear toward the close in a sadder state as the waters recede, but a post-credits scene restores it to vibrancy.

Throughout, the backgrounds confected by Zilbalodis and animation director Léo Silly-Pélissier are gorgeous, and the animal characters are lovingly rendered without striving for the photo-realistic look of some recent Hollywood efforts; indeed, the slight imperfections in their movements seem intended to remind us that they are, after all, drawn representations.  There’s also a duality in their personalities.  These critters bond in the face of danger and cooperate in a way members of their different species would hardly do in real life, joining together, for instance, in a rescue effort at the close. But they’re not anthropomorphized; each retains its natural disposition.  And they don’t talk at all; one of the marvels of the film resides in the pains to which the filmmakers have gone to capture the squawks, barks, meows, hisses and chatter of actual animals.

As the closing credits make abundantly clear, “Flow” is a collaborative effort, the work of many hands; but like another recent animated film—Australian Adam Elliot’s “Memoir of a Snail”—it represents a singularly personal vision.  Zilbalodis is not only its director, co-producer and co-writer, but the art director, cinematographer and editor.  He also co-composed the lovely score with Rihards Zakupe, although the remarkable sound design, no less important, is by Gurwal Coïc-Gallas.

This is a remarkable film that avoids the cookie-cutter feel and overemphatic messaging of so much of today’s animated fare, and its visual beauty will enthrall viewers of all ages.  Of course, cat-lovers will be particularly appreciative.