Pretty Woman meets reality in slo-mo crash
What would Pretty Woman look like if it bore the smallest resemblance to the reality of bought sex? Maybe something like this, Sean Baker’s amazing, full-throttle tragicomedy of romance, denial and betrayal.
The heroine is Anora, though she prefers “Ani”, a New York escort and table dancer played with vocal snap and physical grace by Mikey Madison. One night, the club manager comes into the women’s dressing room and says a highroller is asking for a dancer who can speak Russian; Ani, from an Uzbek background whose grandmother was a Russian speaker, volunteers.
This is Vanya (Mark Eydelshteyn) – a sweet-faced but otherwise entirely appalling and brattishly entitled son of an oligarch. There is an instant spark with tough, smart, unsentimental Ani. Vanya invites her round repeatedly to his staggeringly luxurious crib, pays her a five-figure sum to be his exclusive girlfriend for a trip with his sycophant-squad to Vegas where, delirious with infatuation with the gorgeous Ani, he proposes marriage. But then Vanya’s less than delighted father sends some goons round to sort this situation with his boneheaded son.
The awful story of Ani and Vanya has the horrible fascination of a slo-mo car crash, but the kind of car crash where people call the police but not an ambulance. Everyone in the audience can see what a deeply unreliable prospect Vanya is – and Ani is not so stupid that she can’t see it either. But the point is that Vanya is no more arrogant and dumb than any of the other men in her life.
It is a terrific performance from Madison, who owns the screen, and Eydelshteyn’s turn as the shiftless Vanya is also very watchable. Baker’s film-making is muscular and fluent.