Thinking about Anora (2024)
On the surface level, Anora is a film about the titular Anora (she prefers Ani), a Brooklyn sex worker who gets swept up in a brief, climactic romance with Vanya, the son of a Russian oligarch, before tumbling headfirst into the consequences and fallout of that love. On a bigger level, though, it’s a story about sex, money, agency, and the messy overlap of those three things.
Ani’s journey takes her through a lot of places—from the top of a Vegas hotel to a frenetic road trip through New York City—but so much of it happens to her rather than because of her. A screenwriting 101 book would tell you that this is a bad idea. After all, shouldn’t the protagonist be driving the story? Yet, it works perfectly here. I think this is because that particular tip isn’t actually about the protagonist driving events, it’s a warning about making a passive, boring lead—and Ani is anything but passive.
An excellent performance by Mikey Madison emphasizes that Ani is completely aware of how, for the bulk of the movie, she is being pulled from place to place by others, not of her own free will. If she can’t wrest control of her agency, then she can at least hang on to her dignity, kicking and screaming (sometimes literally) as she’s moved around to solve other people’s problems. She uses an excessive-even-for-New-York amount of profanity to make sure everyone is crystal clear on how she feels about what’s happening to her. The camera assists in building this atmosphere, often settling on Ani, visibly uncomfortable, as the characters argue about the situation offscreen, ignoring her.
The inciting incident of the movie—her decision to accept Vanya’s blunt marriage proposal—is, in many respects, an attempt to claim the agency that Ivan’s money represents. During their brief courtship (where he hires her for a week to pretend to be his girlfriend), she’s taken on a whirlwind hedonistic journey of money, drugs, sex, and pleasure that she thinks might be the rest of her life if she could make this work. This sequence is edited together into a quick montage that feels like how it feels to be really drunk at a really good party. The rest of the movie is the next morning’s hangover.
I’ve been thinking a lot about Vanya, too. On one level, he’s the prototypical flaky rich kid bad boyfriend type, not interested in much of anything other than partying, gaming, and sex. He literally flees from responsibility and accountability the first chance he gets, turning the second act of the movie into a hilariously awkward road trip where Ani and Vanya’s Russian handlers/babysitters travel around New York City trying to track him down so he can sign the annulment papers. But when I think about him, I find myself imagining him like the subject of a nature documentary. Do we blame the lion for grazing on the gazelle, or do we accept it is simply it's nature?
Vanya is a spoiled kid whose every relationship is mediated by money. Why would this transactional relationship with Ani be any different? Every relationship he has is transactional. Of course he would mistake this for true love. He’s too shallow to know any better. And of course he’d run away from Ani and the Russian goons at the first sign of trouble. From Ani’s POV (and thus the POV of the audience), he seems like a selfish brat who isn’t willing to stand up for his wife, but it makes total sense from his perspective. He’s facing something that is, to him, the most serious consequence he has ever faced in his life: getting a real job. Of course he reacts like his life is threatened: to him, it basically is. He treats Ani terribly, but his actions make sense. He’s not cruel, he’s just a shithead.
What Ani slowly learns about Vanya is that his money doesn't actually get him agency, it's just that he's bound in less visible ways. He can party as much as he wants, but only under the eye of his Russian security detail. He can spend and go anywhere, until his parents decide to step back into his life.
I think the movie, in general, does a good job of humanizing characters who could otherwise easily fall into tropes. Take the Russians who enlist Ani to track Vanya down once he’s fled. They could so easily slide into the “Eastern European mobster” trope we know so well, but their lives are more complicated than that. They aren’t out to make Ani’s life miserable for no reason. They’re nervous about what this situation represents for their jobs. They don’t want to be hunting down Vanya and coercing Ani into coming along, but (like almost every other character in the film) they don’t think they have a choice.
The net effect of the realistic characters is that everyone’s choices feel not just natural, but inevitable. They’re just acting in their own self-interest. Once Ani enters that chapel, everything that follows is like watching a ball roll down a hill. The path down is unpredictable, sure, but everyone knows where that ball will, in the end, come to a rest.
I think the movie succeeds because it holds two ideas about its characters at once: first, every character has empathetic, understandable reasons for acting the way they do, and second, almost none respect Ani enough to give her any agency in this story. Almost everyone uses her as a tool to be wielded for their own benefit, or to save their own skin, or just to feel something. They’re too preoccupied with their own problems to look down and see the pain of the woman they think is below them.
The movie puts you in Ani’s shoes and makes you deeply feel her frustration, longing for control, embarrassment and hurt.
Uh, I don’t know if that sells you on the movie or not, but I liked it.
~
Even the name of the film is an attack on Ani’s agency—imagine if she knew that the movie about her life was called Anora?