“Anora”: a three-carat love
We send you notes from a Brighton Beach underground.
By Corrie Tan and Sudhir Vadaketh
We were on the verge of writing off “Anora” when love entered the fray.
The titular character, a 23-year-old stripper who goes by “Ani”, and Vanya, her 21-year-old boyfriend-benefactor, had been on a bender in Vegas with his friends.
The trip had all the trappings one would expect from the scion of a Russian oligarch. A 15-thousand-dollar escort fee that turns a stripper into a trophy “girlfriend” for a week in New York. An impromptu jaunt to Vegas, sparked by lines of ketamine through nostrils and tongued across mouths—and the off-handed line from a rando, “The best ketamine I ever tried was in Vegas”. Champagne sloshing around a private jet. An obsequious Asian hotel manager stuttering because their diamond client had shown up unannounced. A double-storied hotel suite the size of a small mansion, levitating in the sky. Goofing off in the pool under the golden desert sun. Unimaginable bets on the craps table as the elite 0.1-percenters predictably patronise the service staff. Clubs, Drugs, Fucking. Clubs, Drugs, Fucking. Clubs, Drugs, Fucking.
Thirty-five minutes into the film, and its insistent hedonistic refrain had been drummed into us. It wasn’t clear what the cinematic forebears of “Anora” might be: the endearing, if predictable, sweetness of “Pretty Woman”; the dark, confronting, humour and rawness of “Uncut Gems”; or the mindless rollicking tomfoolery of “The Hangover”. Whatever the case, is this Oscar material? One would be forgiven not just for asking that, but wanting to turn it off. However much “The White Lotus” may have piqued our fascination with plutocrats, at a certain point their excesses move from the realm of intriguing to insufferable. It’s nauseating, gnawing at any remnants of hope in society, in this world we share.
Then, the shift.
“Oh, I think I love you,” Vanya said, as he thrust, doggie-style, into Ani. She had just told him to take his time, schooled him in the ancient art, practised by Romans and Taoists alike, of slow sexual gratification. It was a reversal of her earlier position: transactional, rushing him to ejaculation, getting the act over with. Maybe the escort was finally feeling some girlfriend vibes.
Part of director Sean Baker’s genius with the camera work—best director and film editing were two of the film’s five Oscars—is the deft movement between focusing on the person who speaks and those who receive. And part of Mikey Madison’s genius as an actor is how much she conveys with her face. When Vanya says he thinks he loves her—the indecision of this video-gaming boy-man endears in the first third, and enrages in the final—the camera is dropped below Ani’s left shoulder. Her face fills the frame and their bodies glow in the soft light, the hitherto rapid-fire methodical nature of their doggie fucks now transformed into tenderness. We look up at Ani, who despite being bent over in a bestial, submissive position, wields power over her possessor. We see her turning her face to her right, smiling, and raising her eyebrows impetuously. It’s a brief shot that perfectly captures, both for the protagonist and the viewer, the drama’s essential question: is this a love story?
Yes, Ani. Just not with the person who’s humping you.
The first time we meet Ani, she’s wearing almost nothing at all, the climax of a gyrating lineup of pert breasts, thighs and buttocks. “Anora” is full-frontal about the precision and physicality that sex work demands. Ani and her colleagues read a room and their gift is knowing exactly what straight men want, both physically and emotionally. Their discipline is desire. And their expertise is how they bend their bodies to fulfill that desire—whether that’s giving a lap dance, allowing a client to cop a surreptitious (but completely choreographed) feel, or being a girlfriend for a week.
Madison spent six months of dance training to embody that “easy quality” of an erotic dancer’s movements. It’s a practised effortlessness that says: I know what you want before you know you want it. She’s got the gait of a lioness pretending to be a lap cat, fur and purr, glitter around her eyes and tinsel in her hair. She favours iridescent bodycon dresses and shimmery miniskirts. Her aesthetics don’t scream “look at me” so much as “I made you look”. An arched eyebrow and a hand on a shoulder, a crossing and uncrossing of the knees, and clients trail her with a helpless, hapless awe.
If Ani’s physicality and sexuality get a showy, sensationalist introduction, Igor’s is the opposite. No one’s looking at him. The first time we meet the Russian enforcer, he’s chauffeuring around a glorified babysitter: Garnik, an Armenian henchman with a hang-dog look that the oligarch’s hired to keep an eye on his wayward heir. Their goal: get the “night butterfly” out, and get Vanya back to the motherland. Igor doesn’t get a lot of talk time. He’s eclipsed by the much more garrulous Garnik.
“If things get crazy, don’t get rough with Ivan,” Garnik instructs, in Russian. “Actually, don’t even touch Ivan, let me deal with him.”
“What do you need me for, then?” Igor replies through the cigarette in his teeth, his eyes on the road.
Garnik looks confused. “In case his boys are there and they want to play games,” he retorts.
It’s a blink-and-you’ll-miss it conversation alluding to Igor’s physical prowess, because he’s hunched over in a hoodie the whole time, his face an inscrutable mask. The camera keeps Ani in focus, but you’ll catch Igor in the fuzzy periphery. Yura Borisov wears Igor’s reluctance and reticence like a hidden kevlar vest; he keeps his skills close to his chest—until you force his hand. Even when he’s pinning a feral Ani down, kicking and screaming, he’s all restraint. You wonder how a tiny dancer might best a tightly coiled spring of a man almost twice her size, and why he isn’t pulling his weight. He’s socially awkward, he gets in the way, and he seems almost allergic to the use of force.
But it’s the clinical delicacy of Igor’s violence that parallels Ani’s artistry. We only understand the extent of Igor’s physical competencies when he’s up against one of Vanya’s posturing friends in a candy store. The young man’s holding a baseball bat, all flailing arms and empty threats. Igor regards him with the indifference you reserve for a bug you might swat away. He disarms the boy with a short, sharp grab, and—only under specific instruction—proceeds to destroy the store’s glass cases with the smooth, sweeping movements of an Olympic swimmer cutting lazily across a pool while on holiday. Igor’s moment takes up less than a minute, but it’s enough of a teaser. This is not a man you mess with.
In the scene’s coda, after Igor uses the tip of the bat to splinter a twizzler jar, Ani takes over. They make a great tag team when it comes to wringing Vanya’s friends for information: he’s the tooth, she’s the claw. But her lingering resentment for him blinds her to the fact that they’re really on the same team; in fact, they’re in the same position: working-class, street-smart go-betweens who’ve been exploited by their capitalist overlords and shunned for their “dirty work”. (In a particularly ham-fisted directorial move, they both end up with cuts on their right cheeks.)
Igor recognises this a lot more quickly than Ani does, moving into the film’s foreground just as she begins to recede. It’s the reverse striptease: when she realises she’s in danger of losing her fairytale ending, Ani starts putting on her emotional armour. Her clothes come back on (T-shirt, scarf, sweater, heavy Russian sable coat), and her make-up comes off.
If Igor ever had such desires of escaping his station, they’ve been tamped down so deep they never come to the surface. He only allows himself a moment of boldness at the end, and it’s for Ani’s sake. “This may be out of line,” he says, addressing his oligarchian overlords directly for the first time, “but I think it’d be appropriate if Ivan apologises.” That doesn’t happen, of course. Every unhappy family remains unhappy in its own way. In a Tolstoyan twist, Vanya’s zillionaire dad is played by one of Russia’s great dramatic performers, Aleksei Serebryakov—who in Andrey Zvyagintsev’s stunning “Leviathan” also embodies the tragedy of the downtrodden Russian working class.
“No, I don’t speak Russian, but I know Russian.”
“What do you mean?”
“I can speak Russian, I just prefer not to. But you can go ahead and speak Russian. I’ll understand.”
Who is Ani, really? At one level, a dancer whose dedication masks precarity, loneliness and ruptured relationships. She’s in bed late in the morning, a train rumbling by outside, her eye mask giving her a metaphorical blind eye to the stodginess of her circumstance. Her sister asks if she’s picked up the milk. “Do you see milk in the fridge?” comes the sarcastic stinger. No, her sister replies. “Then I didn’t pick up the fucking milk.”
Ani is also a Brooklynite and American with an uncomfortable connection to her Russianness. The only clue about her ancestry is a Russian grandmother, mentioned as explanation for why Ani knows a smattering of the language. For her, Russian isn’t poetry or roots, but a tool grudgingly and performatively deployed in service of male desire. Ani is trotted out to meet Vanya only because he wants a Russian-speaking dancer.
Thus begins her journey through modern Russia, whose caricatures Baker composes, empathically, in the American setting of “Anora”. Vanya, the disillusioned nepo baby unwilling to return to the country and company job from where his privilege comes. The absentee parents who, in their grit, guile and farce, somehow embody both the suffering that Dostoevsky believed was essential to the Russian soul, but also the absurdities of the nouveau riche. (Their imminent arrival in the US, to separate their son from the “whore” and restore family dignity, is the animating event driving the film’s narrative. And the scene where they get Ani and Vanya to annul their Nevada marriage is perhaps its comedic high point.)
Then there’s Toros, an Armenian priest who’s Vanya’s handler and also the family’s de-facto fixer, who’s first shown baptising a baby in an Orthodox Church. Organised religion’s enabling and sanitising of settler-colonialists and gangsters is an old tale, stretching to the complicity today of the Russian Orthodox Church with the actions of the country’s biggest mafioso, Vladimir Putin. Ani and the viewer are slowly sucked into this world of Russia in America, one governed by power and money, where the regular rules don’t apply, typified by Toros’s smackdown of a tow truck driver who’d clamped his SUV. “What the fuck are you doing?” the driver yells, as Toros speeds away. “Fuck you, Russians.”
The film relentlessly exposes these Anglo-Russo frictions (and to a lesser extent, Russo-Armenian ones). There’s an underlying commentary on cycles of history. American free-market ideals at the “End of History” in the 1990s were at least partly to blame for the implosion of the post-Soviet economy, which saw the mass privatisation of the people’s assets and the creation of the oligarch class. Vanya’s appearance in Ani’s life is a reminder of connection, of comeuppance. There is no way for empires like that to easily retreat from the world. Meanwhile, Ani’s unwillingness and inability to embrace her Russianness—eschewing Anora for Ani; a cringe-worthy attempt to speak to Vanya’s mum—is a reminder of cultural difference, of the limits of blood.
And yet the very making of the film is a celebration of Anglo-Russo ties. A slew of famous Armenian and Russian actors worked with a relatively unknown American, who learned Russian just for the role. Perhaps, as with mid-20th century ballet diplomacy during the Cold War, it is art that will show us the way, not the actions of the Kremlin or White House.
Who is Ani, really? It is not just national identities the film interrogates, but our socio-economic ones. Baker keeps the latent terror of his henchmen at bay, allowing their vulnerabilities to show. If Ani is first captured by Vanya’s wealth and then later by Igor’s strength, the catharsis is in Ani and Igor’s recognition of their shared condition. Ani’s doomed attempt to escape circumstance through marriage—“two weeks”, her nemesis in the strip club had given her—is eased through her gradual attraction to a person she initially abhors.
In the penultimate scene, at night in the living room of the oligarchs’ mansion, they trade explicit barbs and implicit affection while the audience finally catches its breath. Ani’s broken Russian and Igor’s broken English—she teases him for pronouncing touché “toosh”—are the imperfections that allow them to feel each other.
And in the film’s denouement, in an old car with winter raging outside, it is their relative physical expertise, the precision of their bodily tools, that almost rip them apart. The lap dancer hops onto the henchman and starts pleasuring him the way she’s been trained; he responds to the physical intrusion the way he’s been trained. Instincts override feelings. The violence lasts longer than it should, and we wonder if Ani’s story will end in horror, Baker again pushing us to the limit.
The final scene is a devastating inversion of the first time Igor and Ani meet. The first time, he subdues her in a desperate bearhug from behind: they need to drag her to a lawyer to get the marriage annulled, and she’s ready to run for her life. The last time, he comforts her in a face-to-face embrace following what may have been the most loveless consensual sex scene we’ve ever seen. Perhaps they’ll never know true love. Or maybe, for lonely souls on the margins of an unjust world, this is what it looks like.