Anora
The thing Anora — and Anora — does best is defy.
From the first tall tales told around campfires by the earliest hunters, to the Bible, Homer, Dante, and to the latest must-watch Netflix series, there are only so many story shapes out there, and the one employed by Anora, Sean Baker’s sleeper hit — as in hit-you-over-the-head-with-unexpected grace hit— would fall into the ‘Cinderella tale’ bucket: girl on the bottom of the totem pole gets swept off her feet by a rich, handsome fellow high on it. Or it would be a Cinderella tale if the prince weren’t a moral and spiritual pauper.
When the overprivileged man-child paying for a week of sex with Anora suddenly proposes, the film breaks the mold of our expectations, with Anora world-weary and derisive instead of flirty and ‘oh-my’ fake. Later, treated like dirt and told repeatedly she doesn’t have a leg to stand on, she kicks and screams bloody righteous murder and stays the course of her battle, however hopeless.
Seemingly given all just to have it snatched away, Anora upholds and fights for the idea of marriage the way only a prostitute — a flying buttress; outside of a structure, but supporting it — would. In the prosecution of that battle, her character is movingly elegant, staunch, alone, and she plainly breaks the stony hearts of viewers resigned to a world that is, in the words of Col. Frank Slade in Scent of a Woman, “fuck your buddy, cheat on your wife, call your mother on Mother’s Day” — breaks them with her moral clarity, her Pocahontas spirit, her defiant disregard of the odds against her.
Apart from coaxing career-best performances from Mikey Madison, Mark Eidelstein, and Yuriy Borisov, it is the director’s great achievement that the strip-club scenes never feel dirty, that the frenetic and violent middle of the film is more cartoonish than frightening. The crisp, by turns intimate and monumentalist cinematography filters out the squalor and elevates the proceedings to the level of Attic tragedy, helped along by the fancy Kodak film and the programmatic filtering out of warm tones.
In contrast to the cliché, as a working girl who has to fight for what’s hers at a job that’s a jungle of base instincts, Anora is no retiring wallflower. She’s got a mouth on her, but her trash talk is more self-defense than cynicism, more keeping a smidgen of self-respect than enforcing a brutal nihilism others in her profession could be forgiven for practicing.
Her eyes — cold, sizzling, knowing, hurt, longing for help while refusing it — her eyes subvert the rank sensuality of her lips. The defiantly unfairytale-like nose between them works hand in hand with the working-class Brooklyn intonations it informs, bringing the enterprise of this paradoxically Romantic film down to earth: full of grit, sure — because, if anything, Anora is that — but somehow above the grime of her profession.
In the end, the subversion—most notably of the tired trope of the hooker with the heart of gold—is itself subverted, making this a Cinderella tale of sorts after all. Yet, far from a trite faux-feminist story of self-actualization via abstraction from the world of men (or a ridiculous modish narrative of a ‘sex worker’ empowering herself by abstracting shame from her moneymaking,) Anora sneaks into the consciousness of its most attentive viewers a view to an unexpected redemption.
A few seconds before the credits roll—just before the character of Anora and all her troubles are to be swept into that drawer in our souls where merely vivid fictional characters slush about for a while before dissipating—she engages in an act of gratitude wholeheartedly sincere and second-nature. It makes sense to us and comes at an easy speed for her — and yet she isn’t ready, and neither are we, for the wormhole into an impossible universe it opens up.
For Anora—whose name, as we learn toward the end, means ‘light’—this may be the beginning of the sort of righting some people achieve from years of therapy. For us viewers of Anora, it’s the last, most heart-rending instance of authenticity this tragic, escapist, painfully true-to-life film delivers, elevating her character to the status of indelible.
By defying our cliches of what a girl in her profession could hope for, Anora rumbles with a flash of idealistic hope that slips us right back into the part of the fairytale in which, just when all hope is gone, the cruel world relents and helps a lost sheep find her way home, which is to say: allows a woman of the night the possibility of escaping into light.
