Anora - Review Thread

In 2003 Comedy Central aired an episode of the Dave Chappelle Show which included a sketch called “Real Movies,” in which Chappelle did a series of sketches showing how various films of the 90s would have actually played out if they were more realistic. It included parodies of The Matrix and Ghost and most apropos it included a very short parody of the movie Pretty Woman which consisted entirely of a Julia Roberts look alike in bed with a Richard Gere lookalike telling him her story of how she found herself in the sex work industry through a series of unfortunate circumstances only to have the wealthy Gere character coldly respond “Okay… you’ve got to get the fuck out of here.” It’s a pretty crude version of the take a lot of people had of that movie, at least the people to took it seriously: that its depiction of the life of a prostitute was beyond sanitized and its use of a “prince charming” to sweep her away from her life was both implausible and also blind to the power dynamics that any such relationship would involve. Even in 2003 it probably wasn’t exactly groundbreaking to do a takedown of that movie, which hasn’t exactly aged like fine wine, but given the movie’s popularity and influence I wouldn’t call it a completely cheap shot either. Now, over twenty years after that sketch aired we’ve gotten a new film from Sean Baker called Anora that dives much deeper into a similar scenario to the one found in Pretty Woman and gives us a much more detailed accounting of what a “real” version of that story would look like and it’s not pretty.

Anora is set in Brighton Beach, the Brooklyn neighborhood made famous by various James Gray films known for its Russian immigrant community. We focus on a stripper named Anora "Ani" Mikheeva (Mikey Madison), a third generation Russian immigrant in her early twenties who learned some Russian from her grandmother and can understand the language but doesn’t necessarily speak it very well. This comes in handy when a rich twenty one year old named Ivan Zakharov (Mark Eydelshteyn), the son of an extravagantly wealthy oligarch, comes into the club and asks for a girl who can speak the language. She impresses him with her moves and gives him her number if he wants to have some “private sessions” outside the club. He takes her up on this and ends up paying her to be his escort for a whole week which eventually culminates in them impulsively eloping in Las Vegas. For a second this seems like it’s going to be a fairy tale for Mikheeva but then Zakharov’s parents learn about what’s happened and call Toros (Karren Karagulian), the man who was supposed to be keeping an eye on Zakharov while he was in America, and he gathers his goons Garnick (Vache Tovmasyan) and Igor (Yura Borisov) to rush in and intervene.

Anora is in some ways a movie of two halves. The first half covers Ani’s initial meeting and whirlwind courtship of Ivan while the second half covers her dealing with the fallout once his family fights back. Ivan is this scrawny little college aged man-child who’s entirely aimless in his life beyond spending his inherited fortune to hedonistic ends, truly an illustration of unrestrained priviledge at its worst. But I wouldn’t say he seems entirely irredeemable. Mark Eydelshteyn plays him in such a way where he does seem like “the worst” to older viewers, you can kind of see why a twenty three year old might think they can “fix” him and while his illogical impulsiveness causes all sorts of problems for the people around him he at least doesn’t exactly seem to mean to cause harm. The extent to which Ani actually feels anything for him versus basically exploiting him for his money is probably the film’s central question and the answer to it is probably complex. Obviously her intentions are literally and figuratively transactional at the beginning and it seems unlikely that should would have rushed into a marriage with him were it not for his money, but she does seem genuinely offended when people later accuse her of being a cynical gold digger and she seems genuinely sad when things start to fall apart in the second half. She doesn’t seem to be a completely naïve character, which she’d kind of have to be in order to really think this relationship would be stable, so one can perhaps intuit that instead there’s a sort of delusion that takes her over at a certain point. She sees a path into a sort of respectability and lets herself believe it’s real instead of entertaining the opposite.

The film’s second half mostly consists of a mad scramble to find Ivan after he literally runs away the second there’s the slightest bit of pressure from the parents that he’s very infectively rebelling against. Here we are introduced to Toros, Garnick, and Igor, the three goons sent to “fix” this situation. These guys probably could have been depicted in a way that’s a lot more overtly menacing but the film takes a bit of a different approach. These three guys are somewhat menacing but are fairly bumbling and are in their own ways also victims of this unpredictable man child and his whims; they’re people having a very bad day at the office. This section almost verges on screwball comedy although one that’s tempered by the fact that there is some threat of violence underneath all of this; Russian oligarchs are known for their mob connections and we’re never quite sure how far these ones will take things if Ani does not end up cooperating. But the comedy is there; like a lot of Sean Baker movies this walks the fine line of being a social realist piece of sorts while stilling being a rather energetic romp with some genuinely funny moments both from just how pathetic Ivan is and from the various banana peels of sorts that the goon squad slips on during the second half.