Anora

dir: Sean Baker

2024

Ah, Anora. Performance of the year, for Mikey Madison as the lead, except for all the other ones. It’s a shame she won’t win any awards, this having been the year designated for rewarding Demi Moore for The Substance and for all the shit she put up with over the last 40 years.

But I’ll be honest, whilst I thought her performance was okay, I’m not sure I see why critics thought this performance was so amazing. In the scenes where she isn’t stripping, dancing or simulating sex, she’s not doing much, and the long, long, long back end of the film mostly has her screaming and / or screaming at people to go fuck themselves in what is meant to be some kind of Brighton Beach accent that mostly sounds Jersey.

I dunno. I’m not pretending to be that familiar with the Russian community in New York, and nor do I know anything about stripping and such, but I do recognise a shaggy dog story when I see one. This feels like an anecdote told about a friend of a friend who had this whacky experience a few months back, you’ll never guess what happened etc.

And, really, I already saw that a couple of years ago with Zola, which was a movie based on a string of tweets on social media.

This, to be fair, takes more time to colour in (or belabour, your mileage might vary) the class conflict aspects of the story, seeing as, when it comes down to it, a bunch of wealthy Russian oligarchs are really just trash people with lots of money treating people without money as trash.

Ani, as she prefers to be known, is not Russian, but she understands a bit of Russian. So her boss at the strip club insists she service a particular client. This client, Ivan (Mark Eydelshteyn), acts like a very wealthy and terrible 16-year-old with zero impulse control. Everything can be bought, money can be thrown at anyone, and there is never a reason not to keep drinking or doing drugs. That he’s in his twenties doesn’t seem to matter much, other than I guess no-one asks him for id, because why would they. Ani’s appeal for him makes slightly less sense, but he’s happy to pay, and she’s happy to continue putting on the performance that makes him think he’s hot shit.

He doesn’t just want her for sex, though. On one occasion, he does his thing within the first fifteen minutes of a hired hour, and just goes back to playing video games. Ani reminds him that there’s another 45 minutes to go, and he’s then like “oh yeah, I could go again” and then presumably returns to his game five minutes hence. Later on he seems content to just have Ani nearby, or cuddled within the crook of his arm as he plays, so he can seemingly do two things at once.

There’s no real illusion, at least for me, that Ani actually likes or even loves this fuckhead. I don’t, I think, does anyone who saw this film really think anything to the contrary? She is tough as nails and streetwise, and he is a jabbering idiot without detectable redeeming features. He’s not, like, a psychopath at least, but there’s very little positive going on there.

He sure would be fun to hang out with for a night or two, but beyond that, you would probably start wondering how you could smother him in his sleep. Instead, after spending a week with him, and making $15,000, Ani thinks she might have hit the jackpot when he proposes marriage.

Huh? Well, he thinks it’s a way to get American citizenship, which should work because he’s rich and white, and it would somehow make his oligarch parents respect him and keep funding the insanely lavish lifestyle that he is accustomed to. And for Ani it’s an end to having to hustle to get by, which would be a relief, and then she could presumably focus on whatever else it might be that she’s interested in (that the flick never shares with us). It’s not depicted that she’s so blinded by avarice or consumerism that she figures it will be mink coats and diamond rings every day, but at the very least it’s potentially something beyond living hand to mouth, day by day as a member of the precariat.

Only a churl would begrudge her that, and probably a middle class churl whose never had to decide between buying food, medicine or cigarettes a week before payday, or who every month isn’t certain whether they’re going to make rent or not. Keeps things exciting and fresh.

But, no, I don’t think anyone thinks she’s in love with this tool. When they get married, all hell breaks loose, and the joyful fantasy of happily ever after (for at least a few months) falls apart when the oligarchical parents find out about their doofus son’s shenanigans and order that goons and fixers get involved.

In American crime films at least, “Russian oligarchs” is shorthand for bratva, or organised crime, because it’s lazy and easy. Russian oligarchs only actually exist at the indulgence of the Russian state in the form of that shithead Putin, and I say that because those oligarchs who control an industry that was previously part of the state, often find themselves losing everything when they fall out of favour or say the wrong thing, or looked in the wrong direction when Putin was around, and they literally have their monopoly taken away from them, and they then either find themselves having accidentally fallen out of a window (along with their family), or poisoned, or both, which often is declared as a suicide by the baffled Russian coroner. So it’s probably not much of an extrapolation to assume that one would have to be mobbed up, as in that Vanya’s dad as an oligarch must have organised crime dudes at his disposal in order to fulfil the job requirements.

Well, if he didn’t, then who would be there to threaten and terrorise Ani?

The film actually takes a different approach to this kind of thuggery. Instead of doing what these types of fuckers would actually do if an American citizen irritated them (immediate brutal murder, with parts of her probably washing up on beaches after several months), they go the much more ‘comical’ and ‘humanist’ path of just having the goons be gentle lunkheads who cop more physical abuse from Ani than she does from them, in the pursuit of convincing her to help them annul the marriage.

Even in such a contrived film that struck me as such a major contrivance. These people wouldn’t care, I’m telling you. They kill people, their families and their neighbours for far less.

The other “funny” element is that when the goons descend upon Vanya and Ani, Vanya scampers the fuck out of there, abandoning her to her fate, and helpfully goes on a bender before his parents are meant to arrive via private jet and sort all this out.

So the major segment of the flick is Ani having agreed to facilitate the annulment, and track down Vanya, while indulging in a very long and very drawn out trawl through all the places in New York where Russian emigres tend to congregate.

As tedious and irritating as I found this part of the flick, we’re meant to be seeing, and understanding, that the goons, especially Igor (Yura Borisov), while doing their paid-for duty, are more aligned with Ani than they are with their rich masters. As if in truth Igor and Ani are linked more by being working class proles than they are at odds because the oligarchs are displeased.

To this I say: bullshit. These same goons would be strangling her to death if the oligarchs changed their minds, no matter how cutesy they act towards her (also despite the fact that they keep calling her a whore to her face).

In the end, there are really no surprises. Vanya is way too weak-willed a piece of shit to go against his parents, and his parents, despite the fact that we get the vibe from the mother that she was probably no different from Ani back in her day before she snared this oligarch piece of shit, she’s not about to let anyone else climb out of poverty, because why would you? If you’ve managed to climb up the ladder, make sure you cut the rungs behind you.

The cruellest these people get, and this is foreshadowed earlier when Ani tries talking exclusively in Russian to Vanya, which he finds cute, but is dismissive of, when she tries to make a good impression on Vanya’s mother, and mangles some Russian phrases as if she learnt them from Duolingo a few minutes earlier about how honoured she is to become part of their prestigious family, oof when they all cringe, that hurt so much more than anything else.

These are terrible people, on the most part, and yes, we know and Ani knows she is better off away from them, but then she’s back where she was before, at the mercy of market forces and deranged presidential executive orders, not knowing where her next $10,000 is going to come from, or whether anyone other than these Russian idiots will ever love her again.

A lot has been made of that final scene, which I’m not going to spoil, and I am in full agreement that it is a strong, final scene that says a lot about the two people in it. It’s just that, for me, it’s a strong scene that finishes off an okay film. I don’t really feel like I learnt anything valuable about these people or about humanity in general, and I say this as someone who’s seen many of Sean Baker’s other flicks, and enjoyed them, on the most part. And I respect where he comes from, which involves treating poor and marginalised characters as people worthy of respect and consideration, even if they do shitty things sometimes, but whose hearts are mostly in the right place because they try to look after the people around them, even if those people are shitty sometimes too.

I liked Anora far more than his last flick Red Rocket which I disliked probably because I cannot stand the sleazy motherfucker who played the lead, being Simon Rex, but I’ve loved his earlier flicks like Tangerine and The Florida Project, and maybe this skews closer towards those. Maybe on a future viewing I’ll get a bit more out of it, and repeated dialogue like “go fuck your mother” and “because you’re a bitch ass pussy” won’t make me roll my eyes as much. It’s too long, but I guess I shouldn’t complain – we’re meant to be happy to be just spending time with Anora, who is exhausted and exhausting in equal measure.

7 reasons having to be fun all the time must be so fucking exhausting out of 10

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“Oh, stay jealous, babe. Stay jealous, honey. Jealousy is a disease, remember that, Diamond. I'm just gonna go chill in my mansion or whatever, you know, no big deal!” - Anora

https://www.imdb.com/video/vi944621081/?playlistId=tt28607951&ref_=tt_ov...