'Anora': A Hilarious and Heartfelt Twist on the Cinderella Story
Someone always has to clean up the mess in Sean Baker's winning feature.
When we think of the Cinderella story, we usually think of “rags to riches.” Someone from an impoverished background finds the wealth they were missing through a twist of fate. Of course, the name “Cinderella” tells us who the character is immediately: girl of the cinders. It comes from the 1697 French version of the folk tale where, because the poor orphan has to sleep by the fire to stay warm, she receives the mocking nickname “Cendrillon.” What the story depicts as misery is one who has to work so hard that their work becomes their identity; hard work and poverty become intertwined as a sad fate, and it’s only through magical intercession and luck that we can hope to achieve wealth and therefore happiness.
In his new feature, Anora, writer-director Sean Baker wisely spies the labor story beneath the Cinderella narrative. Baker’s work typically revolves around the working class's labor. From his debut feature, Take Out, which revolves around an undocumented Chinese immigrant delivering food in New York City, to his increasingly high-profile works Tangerine, The Florida Project, and Red Rocket, Baker makes it a point to try and show the shades and colors of those in the working class in a country that prizes the middle-class family to the neglect of those lower on the socioeconomic ladder. Anora’s first act hints at a fantasy of escape from these circumstances before settling into its real goal, which is about the unglamorous and absurd work that Prince Charming requires of his servants.
The first act throws us into the whirlwind set-up where Ani (Mikey Madison), a sex worker, meets Vanya (Mark Eydelshteyn), the son of a Russian oligarch, at a strip club. Ani speaks passable Russian, so she can understand Vanya and the two hit it off. Ani tries to keep a professional relationship with Vanya, where he pays her to be his girlfriend, which entails having sex, hanging out with him and his friends, and snuggling while he plays video games in his mansion. Vanya is immature but seems like an okay guy who genuinely likes Ani. Following a couple of days of partying in Las Vegas, Vanya proposes to Ani, and after a bit of hesitation on her part, she says yes.
Throughout the first act, Baker whips us up into the fun and frivolity of Ani and Vanya’s relationship. She’s a bit more mature than he is, but they’re both in their early 20s. There’s no darkness in their relationship, and they both like the fantasy of playing house with the bottomless pit of money that Vanya has from his parents. But even here, Baker is doing some clever little things that show hairline fractures in the illusion. He lingers on the shot of Vanya’s housekeepers cleaning up the mess from his New Year’s Eve bash. Ani and Vanya like each other, but there’s little intimacy in their relationship. They never talk about anything too serious, and when they have sex, it’s always fast and typically without Vanya looking at Ani’s face. When she cuddles with him on the couch, he’s more concerned with his video game than holding her and savoring the moment.
When word of the nuptials reaches Vanya’s parents back in Russia, the movie opens up and reveals what it’s truly about. Vanya’s minder Toros (Karren Karagulian), and his two henchmen, Garnik (Vache Tovmasyan) and Igor (Yura Borisov), head to the mansion to ascertain that the marriage is real and then to try and annul it. Ani refuses, and Vanya runs away, which leads to Ani getting stuck with Toros, Garnik, and Igor as they try to track down her AWOL husband. This is not the story of love conquering all. This is a clean-up job, and Ani comes to realize what she thought might be love was another transaction by a spoiled boy.
While the sadness of this story percolates in the background, Baker always assures us that it’s okay to laugh and that no physical harm will befall Ani despite these two strong men coming to her door. In a darker movie, one of the guys would beat Ani until she cooperated, but Baker’s interest is in a different power dynamic where these four characters are constantly reminded of their working-class status and how their fortunes rely on wealthy benefactors we don’t even see. Ani thinks she has it made and that her Cinderella story is complete, but the presence of Toros, Garnik, and Igor lets us know that everyone is still on the clock. This makes Anora have less in common with Pretty Woman than something like Kevin Smith’s Clerks, where you feel like Toros is only moments from crying, “I’m not even supposed to be here today!”
The comic spark also comes from the excitement of the first act that gives us the bottomless charm of Madison and Eydelshteyn playing off each other. Their relationship is sweet, and even though Vanya is immature, you’re hoping that he might man up a little bit and stand by Ani. But once Vanya flees, Madison finds a new gear where Ani’s toughness comes out, and she refuses to be bullied or broken into submission. On the page, Ani is a difficult character because she has to be streetwise enough to be the experienced sex worker we see at the start of the movie but also naive enough to think that a guy who gets everything from his parents will risk his comforts for her. Madison holds these conflicting aspects together effortlessly, just as she easily bounces between Ani’s breezy charm and ferocious temper. This is a star announcing herself, and it’s up to Hollywood to take notice.
Audiences will likely find Eydelshteyn instantly charming, like a Russian Timothée Chalamet, and it’s a fun, flashy performance. But another way you see where Baker’s interest lies is how he quietly brings Igor into the picture. Madison and Eydelshteyn get to be big and broad, but Borisov stands in contrast with the quiet Igor, observing and understanding the role he has to play in all this. Igor’s a hired hand and doesn’t have the room for loud flourishes, so Borisov does some of the best acting I’ve ever seen with just his eyes. Baker always wants us to be aware of how Igor observes both the world and Ani, and he provides a quiet center in the maelstrom created by Ani and Vanya’s marriage. While Madison and Eydelshteyn will rightfully receive lots of love for their performance, the film as a whole wouldn’t work without Borisov’s restrained counterbalance.
These three performances are more than enough to anchor a movie that shows no filmmaker is capturing modern American working-class life like Baker. Rather than issuing polemics on economic inequality, Baker strives to capture the highs and lows of those in this socioeconomic strata. This is not agitprop, but it is advocacy to recognize the full humanity of those who are not merely avatars of broader social issues. Ani is a sex worker like the trans leads of Tangerine, and like that film, Baker is not issuing a statement on sex workers in America; he’s trying to show these characters as flawed, funny, and, more importantly, vibrantly alive. Real lives don’t have a “Happily Ever After”; they have to go on.
The Cinderella story is about finding a way out. Anora is interested in finding a way through.
Recommendations
You may have seen that Jeff Bezos wrote a stupid op-ed defending his decision to scuttle the Harris endorsement less than two weeks before the Election. Jamison Foser does a good job of breaking apart Bezos’ lazy reasoning behind Bezos’ article. I’ll only add that the funniest part is Bezos referring to journalism as “our profession.” Even in the most charitable read that he meant that as the owner of a media company he is therefore part of the media, it still reads as ridiculous. It makes me wonder if he strolls into his spaceship company and says, “Hello, fellow rocket scientists!”
What I’m Watching
Clint Eastwood’s new and possibly final film, Juror #2, arrives on Friday, and it’s good! It’s nothing groundbreaking, but it’s an extremely solid courtroom drama about a juror (Nicholas Hoult) who realizes that the murder trial he’s serving on is actually a hit-and-run because he was the hit-and-run driver. Eastwood and screenwriter Jonathan Abrams draw heavily from 12 Angry Men to where, at times, it feels like the classic Sidney Lumet movie with a little more stuff on it (like what if Henry Fonda’s character had something to hide rather than being the only critical thinker in the jury). That doesn’t make Juror #2 better than 12 Angry Men (you can’t top perfection), but it does make for a captivating story about how justice and truth are intertwined.
Warner Bros. is barely marketing or distributing the movie, which seems foolish. It’s the kind of project that older audiences who made Thelma a sleeper hit would support. But this is what happens when the guy who runs your company doesn’t understand his industry and who, when referring to ditching the relationship with Eastwood, says, “It’s not show friends, it’s show business,” because he’s too dumb to realize he’s quoting the soulless agent Bob Sugar (Jay Mohr) in Jerry Maguire.
I considered writing an entire newsletter devoted to the disappointing fourth season of Only Murders in the Building, but after the awful season finale, I figured it wasn’t worth the effort. The show is cooked. What started as a funny and comforting show about lonely people finding each other has now run out of steam. Within the narrative of the show, they’re fondly remembering their first season, which was only three years ago! This season also featured plotlines that went nowhere, the whodunnit coming to a conclusion so random that it may as well have been any of the new characters who were responsible for Sazz’s murder, and plotting built around shoehorning in guest stars. And hey, if you can get Hulu to pay for you and your buddies to hang out, bully for you, but no one needs to tune in for that.
What I’m Reading
Here are a couple of articles that caught my attention this past week:
Poll results depend on pollster choices as much as voters’ decisions by Josh Clinton [Good Authority] - For as much as polling information dominates the election cycle (heaven forbid we get deep dives into policy choices), Clinton shows that polling is not an exact science. Setting aside how many low-quality polls may be flooding into aggregators at this point, you can see here that even good-faith efforts by pollsters to weigh their data can lead to massive swings in the results. Is this election close? Maybe! But you could also say that one of the candidates is running away with it and has the polling data to back up that result. The only conclusion is that you should ignore the polls and vote. If you want to do more than vote, then canvass, phone bank, or some other action requested by the campaign. Refreshing FiveThirtyEight doesn’t do anything.
The Guardrails Failed. Now It’s Down to Us. by Jamelle Bouie [The New York Times] - You should always read Jamelle Bouie, but this is one of his better editorials this election season. One of the ongoing liberal fantasies of the Trump Era is that someone is coming to save us. It will be grifter Jill Stein funding a recount on behalf of Hillary Clinton. It will be the 25th Amendment. It will be Robert Mueller. It will be Trump’s fast food diet and lack of exercise. Once out of office, there was hope that one of the four trials against Trump would take him off the board and prevent his third run for the Presidency. But as Bouie points out, no institution has ever held Trump to account. If anything, the Supreme Court has now made up rules to further encourage Trump’s lawlessness. To stop Trump and save democracy will, as usual, come down to average citizens exercising their right to vote. To quote the poet June Jordan, “We are the ones we have been waiting for.”
What I’m Hearing
My favorite score this year remains Trent Reznor & Atticus Ross’ work for Challengers. But a close second is Volker Bertelmann’s score for Conclave. Don’t sleep on it.
What I’m Playing
Not as much Dredge as I hoped for, but not for lack of trying. I’ve been busy with freelance writing and watching movies, so I’ve taken my foot off the gas a bit with gaming. However, I will be getting the remastered version of Horizon: Zero Dawn tomorrow, so there’s that.