THB #608: About "Anora"

I waited for a second look at Anora before writing about it. I saw it again with a paying audience, which is always a different feeling than a media/industry screening. And as I walked out, I knew that I didn’t really want to write “a review” of the film.

I really like the film a lot. I am a Sean Baker fan. I am a committed Better Things fan, so Mikey Madison wasn’t hard to connect with, even after her over-the-top turn in the Tarantino film. And I love the pro/non-pro/semi-pro cast of actors that Baker put together, What a group! Karren Karagulian, who plays Toros, is a Baker regular. Mark Eydelshteyn, as young Ivan, is magic. Vache Tovmasyan as Garnick is like a 1940s comedy heavy. And Yura Borisov has that sneaky Ewn McGregor-like charm from the first shot.

For me, the film is, particularly in the first act, a modern take on Preston Sturges and Howard Hawks screwball comedies of the 30s and 40s. I couldn’t think of any one particular film that was a perfect match. But beautiful but strong women and handsome and successful but weak men were not an unusual coupling.

A seemingly at-peace stripper who knows how to take care of herself meets a highly enthusiastic Russian rich kid in the strip club and the budding professional relationship expands outside of the club. Things escalate from there.

The only thing that would not have been completely at home in the 30s or 40s is the nudity and the sex. But Stanwyck might well be giving Fonda a 1st act lap dance as the meet cute if they were both alive and making movies today.

And that is about as far as I can go without SPOILING the film for anyone who hasn’t seen it. Unfortunately, the choices Baker makes in the 2nd and 3rd acts are really what I want to get into and there is no way to get there SPOILER free.

So if you haven’t seen the film, unless you never intend to - and you should - this is where you should CHECK OUT.

SPOILERS COMING!!!

Clear enough?

The escalation of the 1st act leads to… marriage… in Vegas… in a chapel without Elvis.

As we get to the end of the act, the farce pace that the movie has been running at for the most part, gets interrupted a few times by what you might call Sean Baker shots.

This film will be in my Top 20 of the year, for sure. But I am not as sure that it will make the Top 10 or Top 5. Why?

Honestly, I hate when critics write about what “the filmmaker should have done.” But in this case, I feel like Baker expressed his intentions consistently through the film - at least until the last section - and that he ended up undercutting those beautifully executed intentions by making the film the way he makes films - organically - when the structure of the 1st act and most of the 2nd act and some of the 3rd act embraced the wonderful artificiality of the screwball farce.

Not many filmmakers in 2024 are capable of doing what Baker does in the a 1st act and then, to a lesser degree, through the rest of the film. Farce is really hard. It is easy to go to broad or to lose the characters in the schtick.

The 2nd act of the film starts when the 2 now-married lovers, Ani and Ivan, return to the east coast. This is when the reaction comes, driven by Vanya’s parents, from Toros and Garnick and their quiet young muscle, Igor. We have seen these guys, whether stooges or brothers or bowery boys, stumbling through movies forever. Baker writes them beautifully and each gets laughs in their own way.

After Ivan disappears, first the have to manage Ani in an extended sequence that people will remember for a very long time. They need to find Ivan - because the parents are on the way from outside the country - and she is their own way to do it. So in this act, after a lot of fighting - in which she has been threatened in multiple ways and had her 4-carat wedding ring pulled off her finger - Ani has to make a choice… and that choice is to stop fighting and help find Ivan, with the expectation that once they find her new husband that he will take her side and flip the whole situation. (The great Paul Schrader wondered on Facebook why she accepted the offer of 10k to walk away when there was so much more money in play… my thought it that she never expected that offer to survive finding Ivan, as he would not leave her.)

So now the trio is joined together in the goal of finding Ivan. And much of the search is engaging and funny. But for me, this is also where the film loses its way a little for the first time. It is during this sequence when the light touch of the 1st act disappears a bit and it changes the tone of the movie.

My sense of the film structure is that if Baker cut 10-15 minutes of The Search, with the goal of keeping the film a farce throughout, it would have worked better. Some of the stuff that would have to go was great Sean Baker-y stuff… intimate and real and beautiful. But the 2:20 movie could afford the tightening and the energy that makes the 1st act indelible was within reach.

End of the 2nd act comes with finally finding Ivan and the annulment that is trying to be forced on Ani seeming to be at hand… until it turns out that The Trio has screwed up again. They weren’t married in NY or NJ… this has to happen in Vegas. Ani gets another shot at bringing along Ivan and reminding him how much he loves her.

As an audience, I think we are already hip to the idea that Ivan is, as his handlers suggest and Ani doesn’t want to believe, a spoiled brat who enjoys the hell out of Ani - not just her sex - but doesn’t love her enough to make a real commitment. But Ani is still lost in her princess fantasy and hoping it will work out.

Act 3 starts with the arrival of the parents, with the mother as the wicked witch and the super-powerful Russian oligarch husband who withers like everyone else under her intensity. Again, this is archetypical screwball material. Even more so when she triggers Ani, who is trying to position herself as the loving new daughter-in-law. But as he sobers up enough to talk to seriously, Ani finally realizes that Ivan is not serious or strong enough to love her as she thought he was loving her.

The screwball of it, which is still not fully gone, turns darker and more dramatic here. But it didn’t really need to. Again, in my opinion, the material is already there for it to play pretty much along the lines of farce - with moments of dramatic self-awareness - through the third act. These are big swings. The characters are excellent. Big emotions are happening. Everyone is exhausted and frustrated.

Ani gives up. She signs the annulment. She has given up on Ivan. She throws her last valuable possession from the “marriage,” a Russian Sable coat, at The Mother with some choice words. The ability to try to humiliate the mother as she has been humiliated is all she has left.

She is given a night at Ivan’s house to gather her things and get out. She is accompanied by the young, good-looking thug, Igor, who we have watched crush on her from the first time he saw her. He tries to engage her verbally, but there is no chance. She is in full rage.

He picks up her $10k that was promised her and drives her to her home. There is a little flirty conversation… one more try by Igor. “This car is a lot like you.” “Do you like it?” “No.”

Sad ending for a screwball comedy, no?

And for me, that is the moment it should have turned away from the screwball into a pure, truthful, painful Sean Baker film.

I mean… it does. But because the film started ramping down from the pure farce speed it once ran at for most of the previous act, it’s not a very big twist.

That is when the moment that we have never really seen in a movie before happens. And it’s a singular beauty.

Ani comes back to the car, mounts Igor, and slowly, meticulously, pulls out his penis and puts it inside of her. (No, we don’t see anything graphic, if that would bother you.)

It’s sex… but it’s not remotely about sex.

He tries to kiss her… and she fights him off… seriously, physically keeps him from any intimacy. Penetration is nothing. Kissing is intimate.

And finally, she decides to trust him. And she breaks down. All the pain of the previous week of adventures that she is too tough on the outside to ever allow to get to her, pours out in her tears, which he accepts in the way that she needs… that we want for her. And it is a remarkable cinematic moment that Sean Baker is a master of designing and executing.

So it’s a weird feeling. There is nothing in the movie I disliked, as such. But the masterful farce of the 1st is so great that I wanted more. As much as I love Baker’s choices, I wanted less of his soul. And by the end, I wanted the rollercoaster drop of emotion to be even more breathtaking than it ended up being. It was brilliant… but it wasn’t as sharp a feeling as it could have been.

As Baker’s 6th feature since Prince of Broadway in 2008, Anora is his most traditional film. Baker once again shows that he makes choices but is capable of doing pretty much anything that he wants to do.

I want everyone to see this film. There is a ton of entertainment value. The performances are a delight, reminding me more of Demme ensembles than Altman.

Do I think it’s perfect? No. But it’s a lot closer than most other films I see… in any year. I just see it as being a slight shift away… a bit more commitment to a narrative conceit that this filmmakers can deliver at the highest level.

But do see for yourself… if you got this far in the piece.

Until tomorrow…