In an early scene from director Sean Baker’s Anora, two exotic dancers at a Manhattan club take a well-earned cigarette break. The film had already ironically highlighted the significant stamina and physical prowess required by this line of work in the preceding shot, which featured a row of semi-naked lap-dancing women, the deep staging suggesting an endless repetition of gyrating females atop frenzied males. When her colleague glances down at her gawdy gold-plated rings and proclaims, somewhat self-deprecatingly, “I’ve got dollar signs like a real ho,” the eponymous heroine counters by reassuring, “You’re manifesting with those.” The remainder of the film is driven by the indefatigable Ani (Mikey Madison in an Oscar-winning performance) manifesting a desire to escape her modest surroundings for the trappings of the ultra wealthy—mansion, furs, jewelry—by marrying the Ivan-the-fool-esque son of a Russian oligarch (Mark Eydelshteyn). It is her knowledge of Russian, alongside her body, that is Ani’s golden ticket.

Baker’s American film “with a Russian accent,” as the critic Anton Dolin aptly termed it, has enjoyed remarkable critical success. After winning the Palme D’or at Cannes in 2024, it swept the 2025 Academy Awards with wins in five categories, including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Actress. The international cast includes several well-known Russian actors, including Iura Borisov, whose portrayal of Igor, the gopnik with a heart of gold, earned him a nomination for Best Supporting Actor—making him the first Russian actor to be nominated for an Oscar in a performance category since Mikhail Baryshnikov in 1977. Baker reputedly wrote the part specifically for Borisov after seeing him in the 2021 Finnish film, Compartment No. 21. News of Borisov’s nomination was met with a mix of silence and conspiracy theories in the Russian media, since it contradicts the prevailing narrative that Russian culture has been cancelled in the west. (Borisov, moreover, is not one of the “good Russians” who fled the country after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022: he has made no public comment on the war and continues to appear in mainstream Russian films.)

Ani’s journey, from street-smart exotic dancer to oligarch son’s wife and back, takes place in just over a week. Baker narrates the story through four chapters, each with distinctive generic markers, cinematography, sound, and mise-en-scène. In the first, Ani meets Ivan after being summoned to entertain him because of her halting Russian. They toast to their “bad accents,” and the opportunistic Ani leaves Ivan her cell number. In the days that follow, Ani engages in transactional sex and joins Ivan and his hard-partying Russian-speaking friends for a whirlwind trip to Las Vegas. These scenes are accompanied by the insistent and thrusting rhythms of club music, with low-angle shots framing Ani and Ivan embracing happily on the Vegas strip while bright lights and fireworks sparkle in the background. Baker winks at the familiar Pretty Woman fairytale when Ani arrives at Ivan’s house wearing Julia Roberts’ iconic thigh-high boots. That chapter concludes with a sweeping crane shot of the newly married couple kissing on a balcony. In the next, both the camera and Ani come crashing down to earth. The subsequent scenes could fit easily into a Coen Brothers or Guy Ritchie film instead: the throbbing club music is replaced by a baroque cacophony of profanity in Armenian, Russian, and English as Ivan’s parents send their handlers to dissolve the marriage. Ani fights back with her fists and sharp tongue in a masterfully paced sequence punctuated by comic touches: one of the Armenians, battered by Ani, nurses his wounds with a package of frozen pelmeni; Ivan frantically flees his ostentatious mansion while struggling to hold up his pants. The third chapter takes viewers on an engrossing tour of post-Soviet immigrant Brighton Beach, from ice cream shops to nightclubs, as Ani and the gang search frantically for Ivan. The arrival of Ivan’s parents (stellar Russian actors Aleksei Serebriakov and Daria Ekamasova), who descend on New York City like dei ex machina in their private jet from Moscow, heralds the shattering of the fairytale. Their interactions with their infantile son seem to confirm that Andrei Zvyagintsev’s 2017 cinematic diagnosis of neliubov’ (callousness, cruelty, and lack of love) continues to encapsulate contemporary Russian familial dynamics, even when transposed to an American film.

While Anora vainly implores Vania to “be a man,” Borisov’s Igor almost imperceptibly emerges as the true hero of the film’s final chapter. His solicitous gestures, including a well-timed offer of vodka, provide a ray of light in the unmitigated, if often uproariously funny, darkness conjured by the film. Madison’s profoundly humane portrayal of Ani has rightly garnered widespread acclaim for her complex and empathetic depiction of sex work on screen. But it is Borisov’s Igor who introduces the hope that the transactional model of interpersonal relations—the only one allowed through most of Anora—may be transcended. That is a message that resounds in these troubled times, regardless of the accent in which it is delivered.