Anora – 2024
I’m not exactly sure if I agree with the Academy’s decision to award Anora the top prize. I might. The movie might be deserving, but I’m uncertain. The movie was about two hours and twenty minutes, and I didn’t really care for the graphic nature of the first forty minutes. When it comes to films, that’s just not my style. But I didn’t mind the explicit sex scenes. I didn’t mind having to look at naked women. I didn’t even mind the glorification of the sex industry. But it just isn’t my cup of tea, and I think it could have been toned down a bit.
But right about the forty minute mark, the focus of the story went off the rails in a really great way. After that, there was drama, a tiny bit of comedy, and an intense story that kept me engaged. It kept me interested to see what would happen next, and that’s good movie-making. The acting was incredibly good. It all felt very realistic and natural.
The incredible lead actress, Mikey Madison, was perfectly cast. Other standouts for me were Darya Ekamasova, Karren Karagulian, and Yura Borisov. The whole cast was great, but these were the best of the bunch. Especially Ekamasova. Her character was supposed to have a superior and commanding presence, and she nailed it.
The story begins in a Brooklyn sex club. We meet Ani, whose real name is Anora, played by Madison. She is happy and smiling, working hard to invite men into private rooms with her for a lap-dance. Once she gets them there, she quickly undresses and goes to work. But her shift takes an unexpected turn when her boss introduces her to Vanya Zakharov, played by Mark Eydelshteyn, the son of uber-wealthy Russian Oligarch, Nikolai Zakharov. Vanya is a partier, a drinker, and a drug user, and he pays Ani thousands of dollars to spend time with him away from the club. He pays her for sex, and she does her job. (And we get to see it all.) But then he escalates the arrangement, paying her fifteen thousand dollars to be his girlfriend for an entire week, which she agrees to do.
While on an impromptu trip to Las Vegas, Vanya tells her that the parents he hates will soon be taking him back to Russia. But then an idea takes him. If he got married to an American girl, his parents would have to let him stay in America. Ani agrees, and they go straight to a Vegas shot-gun wedding chapel. They get a real marriage license and start living together in Vanya’s mansion. Anora stops working at the sex club.
But this is where the movie took its turn. Word gets back to Vanya’s parents that their son has been married. The mother, Galina Zakharov, played by Ekamasova, who everybody seems to be afraid of, gets his Armenian godfather, Toros, played by Karagulian, to collect him, get the marriage annulled, and have him ready to return home. Toros’s two heavies, Garnik and Ivan, played by Vache Tovmasyan and Yura Borisov, arrive and force their way into the mansion. After a shouting match, Vanya runs out the door, leaving Anora behind. He escapes into the city.
An enraged Anora tries to leave as well. She goes into hysterics and screams and fights the two men, biting Igor and breaking Garnik’s nose. But she is restrained, tied up, and eventually gagged to keep her quiet. From there, the insanity just continues to grow. The story keeps ramping up the intensity, and the film keeps the pace going.
Toros arrives and tells Anora that the marriage will be annulled. He offers her ten thousand dollars to agree. She refuses to go through with it, though she does agree to help him find Vanya somewhere in New York City. The three Armenians and Anora search all night and find him. Igor shows signs of being attracted to Anora. They eventually find her husband getting a lap dance from her old rival at the sex club where they met. Vanya is so drunk he can barely stand.
Meanwhile Vanya’s parents arrive. Galina walks into the scene like a powerhouse and takes control of the situation. Anora tells Galina that she’ll grant the divorce, but she will get a lawyer and sue Igor for assaulting her, and the Zakharov family. Galina puts her in her place like a boss. I loved her speech. “Do that, and you’ll lose everything. Any money you may have–although I doubt you have much–will be gone. Do you have a house? Do you have a car? All gone. Your life and the lives of your family and friends, everything will be destroyed.”
On the plane trip back to Vegas for the annulment, Anora finally figures out that Vanya is a child and an asshole. She yells at him and fully agrees to the divorce. In Vegas, the annulment happens and Anora willingly signs the papers.
Igor takes her back to New York and she stays in the mansion for the last time. The two bond a little while smoking some weed. Anora tells him that if Garnik hadn’t been present when she was assaulted, Igor would have raped her. He denies it. She asks him, “Why wouldn’t you have raped me?” I loved his simple answer. “Because I’m… not a rapist.”
There was more that happened before the end, but that’s the main gist of the plot. The film was good, but it’s being toted as a work of recognition and respect for the sex-worker community. Apparently, Director Sean Baker made a point of not only interviewing real members of the profession, but hiring Andrea Werhun, an actress who used to be a sex-worker, as consultant for the movie. The film got mixed reviews from the sex-worker community. Some thought we were shown a positive portrayal of the profession, while others disagreed, criticizing the trope of a female sex-worker who is in need of saving by a man.
But Madison’s performance, while crude and intensely annoying, actually has some power behind it. She played the character the way it was written. I didn’t have to like the character to see that she acted the part perfectly. And what made it even more impressive was the preparation that apparently went into her performance. Madison learned to speak Russian, visited strip clubs, and studied a Brooklyn accent to create the character of Ani. And if it wasn’t her natural accent, she maintained it incredibly well throughout the movie.
Interesting Note: Baker apparently cast Madison without an audition after seeing her in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood as Sadie, a member of the Manson Family, and also in Scream two years after that.
But of course there were other actors in the film who did a great job. I have to mention my favorite character in the movie, Igor, played by Yura Borisov. He was the only character in the entire movie who wasn’t an asshole. He never did anything to physically hurt Anora. He showed that he was just there to do a job, and that he eventually came to care for the girl a great deal. He felt sympathy for her, and in the end he’s the only one who showed her real kindness.
Because I see it the way I’m supposed to see it. Yes, Ani was the victim. She did nothing wrong except make incredibly bad decisions, and I’m not talking about her profession. She was not dumb because she was a sex-worker, or vice-versa. She was dumb because she made very bad decisions, the biggest of which was not seeing that Vanya was an immature child and marrying him. So, yes, Anora got the short end of the stick. But she brought a lot of it on herself.
And Igor saw that. He felt sorry for her, and he did his best to support her and care for her, in his own way, through the trauma. And the supreme act of kindness he showed her when he gave her back her ring just proved that even though he was little more than a thug, he had a heart.
And it was there, right at the end, the last moment of the film that we see Anora’s walls crumble and she lets loose her true emotions. Sensing that Igor liked her, she thanked him in the only way she knew how. She undoes his pants, climbs on top of him and begins having sex with him. But he ruins the moment for her by trying to kiss her. She ends the sex, slaps him, and then finally brakes down in tears. And all Igor could do was hold her and comfort her. He was the real hero of the film, and he did it with simple kindness.
I thought Vache Tovmasyan, as Garnik, was going to be the biggest heavy, but after Ani breaks his nose with a well-placed vicious kick, he turns out to almost be a strange comic relief character. I had to laugh when he threw up in Toros’s car. I also thought Karren Karagulian did a great job as Toros, a man who was just desperate to follow Galina’s orders. He was obsessed with getting the job done, and he didn’t care who he had to go through to do it. And speaking of Galina, I’ve already mentioned how much I loved her character. She was so dominant in every scene she was in. Well done Ekamasova!
And as much as I hate to admit it, the worst character in the film, Vanya, was perfectly played. We aren’t supposed to like him. Mark Eydelshteyn did a great job of making me hate Vanya. He was a spoiled son of ridiculously wealthy parents, and Eydelshteyn couldn’t have been more convincing. He was so immature, and selfish, and smarmy, and… Man, he was a douche!
And finally, I want to mention one actress who had a part that was small but necessary. Lindsey Normington played Diamond, Ani’s rival at the strip club. She was just that perfect blend of bitchy and pathetic, and she kept up with the rest of the cast easily. I loved the scene where she is having a private session with a wasted Vanya, specifically to spite Ani. Toros and his thugs break in and Ani is trying to talk to Vanya who isn’t even fully conscious. And Diamond is in the background shouting that Vanya’s hour still isn’t up.
Now, on to the big question. Do I think this should have won the Best Picture award? I don’t know. Parts of the narrative had that quality, and fit into what I have come to expect from a Best Picture winner. But the first forty minutes of the movie were just dressed-up soft-core porn. And I have to ask, would the movie have suffered if some of that was taken out? Would what happened after that have had the same impact if we hadn’t spent so much time in the strip club looking at bare breasts and butts, or watched Ani and Vanya having sex in various positions? Would the movie has lost its intensity without all the sex and the drugs and partying in the first act? Would we have less understanding of the character of Anora in the second half of the film, without going through her experiences with her in such graphic detail in the first?
Maybe. But the movie is what it is, and it did win. Obviously, the critics loved it just the way it is. It has a 93% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, and Metacritic gave Anora a score of 91 out of 100. Per Wikipedia, Richard Lawson of Vanity Fair called it a wild profane blast. Acclaimed director Greta Gerwig called Anora “something we collectively felt we were transported by, we were moved by.” I don’t know if that’s true or not. I mean, I felt sorry for Ani, but I wouldn’t say I was transported.
And now that I’ve seen all the movies that were nominated for Best Picture, would I have chosen Anora for the win? I don’t think so. It was a good movie, but I liked Conclave, Nickel Boys, and Emilia Perez better. I thought they had better messages, were more creative in their story-telling, and they held my interest better.