Editor’s note: On March 2nd “Anora” won the Oscar for Best Picture, as well as four other awards.
He hasn’t been around for long, either in reality or fiction, but the Russian oligarch and his entourage are already familiar figures. They splurge their petrodollars on yachts and Cristal champagne, wowing Westerners with their profligacy. The oligarch’s minder has a thick neck, dead eyes and a conscience unruffled by violence. Noirish thrillers like “McMafia” are their genre.
The sex worker is a longer-standing fixture of cinema and appears in several guises. She (and occasionally he) might emerge from poverty and succumb to a grisly fate. She may be an object of glitzy prurience. Or she is Cinderella in stilettos, redeemed by a rich man’s love. She flits from romantic comedies to crime yarns and erotica.
“Anora”, a film by Sean Baker, an offbeat director, brings these two character types together—sort of. Its heroine fits all the sex-worker templates and none. Its Russian crew are predictably ruthless, but also tender and contrite. Tipped for Oscar glory, “Anora” shows up the inadequacies of stereotypes and formulas, yet in doing so demonstrates their power. The film relies on them for its impact. Many good stories do.
The name of the 23-year-old heroine (played wonderfully by Mikey Madison) is Anora, but she goes by Ani. At night she lap-dances at a club in Manhattan; by day she sleeps in a grotty pad in Brighton Beach. Vanya (Mark Eydelshteyn) is the goofily obnoxious, man-child son of a Russian oligarch. He buys a dance from Ani, then pays her for sex in his parents’ mansion, then hires her as his girlfriend for a week, flies her to Las Vegas for a bender—and marries her. So far, so “Pretty Woman”, only with much more nudity and ketamine.
But now the trouble starts—for both Ani and your preconceptions. An Armenian priest who moonlights as Vanya’s babysitter turns up with his brother and Igor (Yuriy Borisov), an enforcer first called simply “the Russian”. Their job is to make the marriage go away, perhaps, you fear, by swapping Ani’s heels for a pair of concrete boots. But the toughs aren’t quite what they seem, and it is she who, fighting for her life, and for the life she dreams of, lands the fiercest kicks.
Vanya scarpers. Since his presence is needed to have the marriage annulled, a screwball quest to find him ensues. Mr Baker’s film, it becomes clear, will no more conform to type than will its protagonist. Its middle stretch is an absurdist nocturnal trek on which truths come to light, like King Lear’s sojourn on the heath but on the boardwalk in Coney Island. To find her husband, Ani rides along with the Armenians and Igor. In a world of overlords and underlings, however, might they ultimately be on the same side?
According to critical theorists, fiction has a finite number of basic plots. There are supposedly either six, seven, 20 or 36 of them: “overcoming the monster”, “rags to riches”, “voyage and return” and so on. That may be an exaggeration, but, inevitably, punters experience each drama through the prism of similar tales they have been told before. Originality often lies not in breaking the mould but in finessing it. “Anora” does that ingeniously, in particular in the depth and nuances of Ani and “the Russian”.
In essence its structure resembles that of another of the year’s kookier movies: “Hit Man”, a caper about an undercover cop who, while posing as an assassin, falls in love with a would-be client—a romantic pairing even less propitious than a stripper and an oligarch’s heir. Likewise toying with stereotypes, that film, too, asks whether people are trapped in the roles life assigns to them, or can shape-shift into new ones.
Yes, says “Hit Man”. Of course not, says Mr Baker, who dodges cliché but not reality. Ani is under no illusions, and neither is “Anora” (which is, after all, the name she prefers not to use). Megawealth like Vanya’s can be its own form of prison, but it affords an ironclad impunity from the consequences of his mistakes. Like the nude-shaped vodka luge at his bacchanalian house party, if a magic slipper is on offer, it is made of ice, not glass, and it melts.
Life isn’t a fairy tale or a feel-good movie. “Anora” invokes those fantasies only to repudiate them. But it does the same with the other genres that, at first, its characters seem destined to reprise. Here, proficiency with a baseball bat need not make you a monster. Ani’s brass and steel conceal a wrenching vulnerability. And when she seems doomed to the scrapheap of bleak social realism, she earns a kind of love story, if not the one you were expecting.■
For more on the latest books, films, TV shows, albums and controversies, sign up to Plot Twist, our weekly subscriber-only newsletter