TikTok was made for couples like them.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: I’m a prude who’ll never win a debate at Film Twitter’s water cooler and is not among the pro critics who spent the past few years writing thinkpieces about the lack of sex in today’s movies, up until Poor Things and Challengers apparently sated their appetites while they waited for the next Criterion 4K-remastered cult-favorite re-releases about sexual awakening or sexual liberation, which we all need now more than ever in case the internet runs out of porn. Ever the irrelevant blogger, I’m happy keeping my amateur-hobbyist consumption within certain boundaries.

That personal guideline sometimes conflicts with the rules of my favorite annual game: Oscar Quest! I’ve seen every Academy Award Nominee released from 2021 to the present and continue running myself into the ground while seeing how many nominees I can watch in every single category before the big ceremony — regardless of whether I think I’ll like them or not, whether their politics and beliefs agree with mine or not, whether they’re good or bad for me, and whether or not my friends and family have ever heard of them. Some years, I’ll try getting a head start and watch a few potential nominees in advance, based on buzz among the critics I follow on social media and, for my first time this year, begrudgingly peeking at the Golden Globes’ finalist list for possibilities. Sometimes the pre-homework pays off; sometimes I end up having watched a movie just for movie-watching’s sake.

Hence: Anora, a tiny indie released last fall that critics still won’t shut up about. I greatly enjoyed one of writer/director Sean Baker’s previous films, The Florida Project, whose characters and living situations reminded me of a few distant relatives and of old people I knew in my bygone restaurant-manager days. (Willem Dafoe picked up a deserved Oscar nod for it!) Anora‘s reviews positively glowed but kept calling it “SEXY!”, which for me is usually Strike One on my scorecard before deciding whether to see a given film. Nevertheless, I gave it a shot in hopes of reducing my fun workload after the Oscar nominations are announced this Thursday morning. As it turns out, I was pleasantly surprised once I could stop averting my eyes after the first twenty minutes.

At face value it’s the time-honored, surefire premise of star-crossed lovers gone awry. Mikey Madison (Scream V, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood) plays Ani, a 23-year-old woman who works hard for her money but lives with her sister because NYC living ain’t cheap. One day she meets a 21-year-old gamer named Vanya (Mark Eydelshteyn), an excitable party animal from Russia with no discernible responsibilities, no resemblance to the Chekhov character, and seemingly unlimited riches and access. She shows him a few things that blow his mind; he takes her on a week-long whirlwind worldwide vacation. Two weeks after they meet, they fly to Vegas for a perfectly legal, quickie wedding and totally plan to live happily ever after for the next fifty to eighty years in her mind. In your ’30s romantic comedies, a two-week courtship might seem an eternity. In our real world, those of us who can’t believe we survived our idiot twentysomething phase can lay odds where their “relationship” is headed.

For that matter, so can Vanya’s family, the real accountholders of the wealth he’s been squandering. They vehemently disapprove of this shallow union, drop whatever they were doing and head directly to the Big Apple to overrule the youngsters’ snap judgments and file for immediate annulment. The film’s centerpiece is a showdown at “Vanya’s” extravagant place filled with luxury furniture and priceless art pieces, a perfectly Three Stooges setting for a masterwork of intense, awkward, hilarious screwball dramedy with light injuries as the family’s goons must contend with Ani’s volcanic meltdown, climaxing in a screaming match that’ll have you laughing even as it pierces your eardrums.

When one of the important participants flees the scene, a merry chase ensues through the boroughs, festooned with Robert Altman dialogue overlaps and Uncut Gems‘ frenetic urban-jungle sound design. Our reluctant band of marital bond-breakers loathe getting to know each other and cause more than a little damage along the way, and toss in a warts-and-all stop at Coney Island, where the camera mostly turns away from the rides (which past films preferred to dazzle us with) and toward the smaller businesses where fate sends our ensemble for their exasperating quest.

Hollywood rules of thumb about what they think audiences want are not among Baker’s interests. One of his strengths as an indie storyteller is the freedom from studio feel-good machinery and an inclination for exploring complicated characters and the logical consequences of their choices rather than appeasing the focus groups who might demand more predictable behavior. To that end, Anora is not a romantic comedy that roots for Ani and Vanya to conquer all and to teach the olds a little lesson about love. They are realistically their own ages. Madison, in particular, embodies Ani as an extremely strong-willed resistor (sometimes belligerently so) who’s accustomed to standing her ground but doesn’t easily accept she might have shortcomings or, in fact, might be wrong about anything and will bulldoze anyone who dares confront her. (This tracks with her two previous credits I mentioned above, in which she played two different psychopaths with equally murderous intents.) As 23-year-olds go, that feels like the baseline nowadays. In the other corner, Vanya is his country’s answer to Jean-Ralphio Saperstein, a spoiled-rotten trust-fund baby who could headline his own vapid reality-TV series if their runaway elopement yields green-card dividends.

Just as our main couple aren’t Prince Charming and the Disney Princess of your choice, their Russian antagonists aren’t “bad guys” per se, either. Karren Karagulian, a regular from Baker’s other films (Red Rocket, Tangerine), is Toros, leader of the breakup squad sent by Vanya’s parents to get the annulment papers rolling till they can make the long flight in from their homeland to supervise everything with in-person iron fists. Baker keeps their background ambiguous at first so we can’t tell for sure whether they’re an official Mafia who’ll end this marriage By Any Means Necessary And We Mean ANY Means, or whether they’re just the heads of Russian Waystar Royco, burning with rage yet keen to keep everything above-table. Our initial impression of Toros might be he’s a thuggish middle-manager who’s considering putting a bullet in Ani’s head (especially after that screaming match); after some hours, as the night drags on and the group journey encounters one ludicrous setback after another, I kinda felt sorry for him and his guys, each of whom are more than one-note minions. (The camera lingers on one in particular, played subtly by Yura Borisov, foreshadowing his gradual subplot path from mere muscle to a more thoughtful position.)

The biggest drawback for us stick-in-the-mud viewers: that first twenty minutes. Within seconds Baker descends into the world of strip clubs and the full scope of women’s performances portrayable within the confines of an R rating as the MPA presently defines them. Ani is a “sex worker”, which is usually a euphemism (the internet loves those way more than I do,) but is a fair descriptor here in its broadness as she offers more than one kind of service…well, at least she does to Vanya, anyway. Ani prefers “exotic dancer” and visibly rankles whenever her opponents have the audacity to call her a “prostitute”, “hooker”, or the Russian word for “whore”. That sort of material is absolutely Not My Thing by personal choice, even if it might’ve drawn applause from critics who bring their laptops down to the clubs and bang out their reviews there.

For similar reasons I’ve never seen Striptease or Showgirls — not even ironically — or Closer or even Pretty Woman, though I strongly doubt Julia Roberts dared just about any of Madison’s, er, stunts displayed here. Anora has already been playing for so many months that I attended a Tuesday 8:30 p.m. showing and had an entire AMC screen to myself, feeling like I’d sneaked into a millionaire’s home peepshow booth. The whole time, I couldn’t help wondering if there was a projectionist up in the booth, monitoring the room and making sure I didn’t pull a Paul Reubens.

I get that Baker is grounding his environment to a nearly neorealist extent, just barely stopping short of glossy “Friday After Dark” artifice. I can get how that opening setting relates to everything that follows — especially in the extended epilogue, when some realizations dawn upon Ani that contrast deeply with the world as she’s known it up to this point. And I’m down with the artist’s First Amendment right to tell their stories their way, a side effect of 46 years of comics fandom and observing that medium’s growing pains and maturation. That doesn’t necessarily mean I want to watch or read it all myself.

I realize so much of this might seem like I’m splitting hairs (literally, in one sense), but it’s where I’m at. Regardless, if Anora gets some Oscar nods, I can understand why and I can cross it off my to-do list up front. I can also imagine an impossible alt-timeline in which, if a larger studio had picked up Anora and I somehow found myself tricked into one of their focus groups, I might’ve helped ruin it by asking our moderator if they could just lop those frisky twenty minutes off the top, because much of what follows is much more my kind of complicated cinema gold.

…

Meanwhile in the customary MCC film breakdowns:

Hey, look, it’s that one actor!: Aleksei Serebryakov (Nobody) and Darya Ekamasova (The Americans) are Vanya’s one-percenter parents who will burn everything around him to the ground if he doesn’t recant RIGHT NOW. If you watch far more streaming shows than I do, you might or might not recognize Ella Rubin (Hulu’s The Girl from Plainville) as Ani’s barely seen sister, or Ivy Wolk (FX’s English Teacher) as a friend who works at a Coney Island candy shop.

How about those end credits? No, there’s no scene after the Anora end credits, formatted as Scorsese/Tarantino/PT Anderson-style static cards rather than the usual vertical scroll. It took me a couple minutes to notice they ran eerily quietly, which in turn made me wonder if the film even had a score. Source music was prevalent all throughout (especially through the club scenes, of course), which takes at least four widescreen cards to credit. The only song I knew while watching was Icona Pop’s “I Love It (I Don’t Care)”, and the only other act I recognized afterward was t.A.T.u., but it flipped to the next card before I could catch the song title. This is why I resent non-scrolling credits — no problem at home with a pause button, but aggravating if you went to the trouble of supporting it in theaters and stubborn enough to sit through the entire work, including the credits.