Blue Valentine, An Education, Silver Linings Playbook, Pretty Woman, The Worst Person in the World, Before Midnight, and Like Crazy. These were the seven movies in the first article I pulled up after an online search of “movies like Anora” returned. As a fan of all seven films, I needed nothing more to decide that Sean Baker’s (Red Rocket, The Florida Project) Anora was one I needed to see. I did not need to see a preview. I did not need to read a synopsis. Instead, I had to find out how quickly I could watch the film. My viewing happened soon after. It was a mixed bag and one that mostly failed. While Silver Linings Playbook and Pretty Woman have good-natured moments of good-naturedness and humor, I wouldn’t label any of these as comedies or unbelievable. While I could see vague similarities, Anora was much more comedy-first, absurd second, and attempts to portray emotional bleakness third. I would not have listed it with the movies the article I read compared it to.
While Anora’s had a reasonably familiar premise we’ve plenty of times before, in its first act, it established its characters and tone exceptionally well. The film has a runtime of 139 minutes, and starting late at night, I watched the first half then and half when I woke up. The two halves were like night and day (literally and figuratively). Just shy of an hour in, I thought I was watching something that had a legitimate chance to be a contender for the best movie of 2024. The second half of the film ultimately falls off the rails. Baker had the elements with his two equally enigmatic and colorful leads that, through circumstances, brought together in slums of a dingy, dimly lit, but frequently visited strip clip.
Anora (Mikey Madison – Scream, All Souls) is a 20-something stripper working in a Russian-speaking neighborhood of New York City. We don’t know much about her backstory. She lives with a roommate she doesn’t particularly like, works with other dancers she doesn’t always get along with, and works a job she doesn’t want. However, she seems to receive adequate client compensation that makes it all worthwhile, even if it’s just for a short while as she figures out her life.
Ivan (newcomer Mark Eidelstein) is a 21-year-old cocaine-infused son of a wealthy Russian family. He lives alone in a New York mansion owned by his parents, spending his game getting high or drunk while playing video games in his underwear. At the strip club, Ivan is introduced to Ani, as she is a dancer who understands and can speak Russian. While Ari can comprehend Russian, she prefers to talk in English. Ari understands and speaks very little English. However, each understands they are at a strip club and aren’t there to talk.
Baker had the proper characters to tell a better story. The mysterious Ani knows what men want and what she can get from them. Ani also knows that what she has to offer (her good looks and body) is something she won’t have forever. She tries to understand it and wants peace in a broken world. She works hard and appreciates every dollar she earns. Ivan, meanwhile, has more money than he knows what to do with, none of which he has earned. He gets drunk and high, visits strip clubs with his friends, and lives frivolously to pass the time.
When Ivan offers Ari $15,000 to be his girlfriend for the week, we still aren’t sure what will happen. However, based on their interactions up until that point, what she sees as a transactional deal, he sees something beyond that. This good has been the story on its own. Instead, we get a story of two people with no romantic chemistry who, in short order, agree to marry. The problem is that, as an audience, it’s not believable. When they aren’t having sex, she is snuggled up, watching him play video games like a teenager. Nothing suggests that this is anything more for either of them.
That’s why it makes TOTAL sense when they agree to get married. While there are hints at ulterior motives for each character (chiefly Ani coming into wealth and Ivan earning his green card to become a United States citizen), Baker wants us to believe (I think) that their relationship is built on a little bit of physical attraction and maybe a promise of a future better than the ones they each currently have? I say that I think because it’s hard to know what Baker was trying to do. He tries to touch on a little bit of everything in this film. There is inadequate emphasis on comedy, drama, desire, romance, love, grief, despair, greed, substance abuse, mental health, violence against women, and more. As much as I wanted him to, he never took his story anywhere meaningful. We weren’t invested in either character. Ani was our protagonist, but she wasn’t someone who cared about or even really felt a little something for.
After the wedding, Anora takes a turn for the worse. The film almost becomes a slapstick comedy. When Ivan’s parents learn of the wedding from Russia, they force Toros (Karren Karagulian), the man supposed to govern their son, to get the wedding annulled. When Ivan flees, Toros, his two henchmen, and Ani search, seemingly all of New York City, trying to find Ivan. If not for the 423 times the F-word is used (#6 most number of times a feature-length film has ever used that word), Anora, at its best, feels like a lousy mash-up of Fargo and Honeymoon in Vegas. At its worst, it’s a film that wants to take itself seriously through situations that would never happen. It gets more and more preposterous as it painfully bobs and weaves to a final scene that could have been effective in the proper film but one that shifted completely in tone and narrative, rendering everything we watched up to that point futile.
Anora had everything going for it before throwing it all away. It wanted to tell many things well. It failed at most.
Plot 7/10
Character Development 7/10
Character Chemistry 7/10
Acting 7/10
Screenplay 7/10
Directing 7.5/10
Cinematography 7.5/10
Sound 7/10
Hook and Reel 9/10
Universal Relevance 7/10
73%
C
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