TW: Mentions of Sexual Assault

Anora, by Sean Baker, is a recent gem from A24 and Warner Bros about a young escort’s struggle to hold on to her newly-wed life, when her impulsive husband, Vanya, runs away. Anora, or ‘Ani’, as she prefers, is launched into a world of Russian mafiosos, massive confusion and heavy trauma.  

Now, let’s get the technical stuff out of the way.

The film has been released on a limited basis because, like many of Baker’s movies, it was shot on film – KODAK 35mm Widescreen, for the analogue fundamentalists. The nostalgic graininess of the film compliments the setting perfectly as we are hurled through the hazy sparkle of nightclubs and vibrant Brooklyn streets. I was also massively impressed by Drew Daniels’ cinematography. Everything - the lighting, framing, symmetry and asymmetry – was simply stunning and clearly well thought out.  

One of the elements I enjoyed the most was the dialogue in this film, which was hilarious at times and soul-crushing at others. The argument scenes felt so frustrating, as they were intended, with everyone yelling over the top of each other in a cacophony of stress and misfortune. Perhaps some of these scenes went on for slightly too long, and there were times where I thought okay, we get the point, time to move on, especially when the arguments were somewhat stagnant in their material. But this didn’t detract much from my enjoyment of the film, and it’s forgivable in the face of brilliant performances from the entire cast.  

That’s enough of the formalities - now let’s get into the good stuff (SPOLIERS BELOW!!). 

Anora’s central plot surrounds a whirlwind of a night as a group of mob-men, accompanied by Ani herself, search for Vanya after a spur-of-the-moment Vegas wedding. Even as Ani sinks deeper, the exit is always available to her, but strangely, she refuses to do anything about it. At times, I felt like screaming for her to get out of there! But I bit my tongue as I started getting the impression there was more than just a lust for money holding her back. Ani maintained that she and Vanya were ‘in love’, and while I couldn’t imagine her being any more than a personalised escort to him, I refused to believe Sean Baker didn’t intend for another layer to Ani, or that she would fit so easily into the ‘gold-digging stripper’ trope. 

More on that later - we need to talk about that final scene. 

I haven’t felt such a loud silence in a movie theatre in a long time, like a thick fog hanging over us as the credits rolled, and we all fumbled to make sense of what we’d just seen. I’ve heard people say they think Ani was assaulted in this scene, and others who think the opposite, but honestly, I love its open-endedness more than any resolution we could have been given. While it first seemed strange that Baker ended the film on a note of such tension, now I actually see it as a release for Ani in a moment of calm and vulnerability after the previous events. Ani stayed so strong during the unimaginable trauma she experiences throughout the film, which she only acknowledges after Vanya leaves for good.  

So then comes the question: Did Ani really love Vanya?  

I want to take the harder route here and say, yes. In a way, she did love Vanya. He gave her a way up and out of a life that doesn’t afford many chances for promotion. While their relationship wasn’t a Disney-end-credits romance by any means, that doesn’t make it any less real. Love is complicated. It shows up when it’s painful to let it in, and is often felt the deepest when you’re told you can’t have it. I am not suggesting that at the core of every broken woman is some desire for stability and romance. That would be a boringly convenient resolution. I am simply suggesting that within the cesspool of crossed wires that we call a human brain, is it not possible that a means of self-preservation could be felt as love? Stranger things happen for less. So why shouldn’t Ani love that scruffy Russian man-child? Perhaps that explains why she was so aggressively determined to hold on to her new life with him. 

Baker is renowned for his brilliant portrayals of characters that seem so tragically and beautifully human. Just watch The Florida Project (2017) to see what I mean. Their behaviour is so unapologetically genuine, almost to the point that watching their lives unfold feels like an invasion of their privacy. However, Anora is largely void of substantial backstory or exposition, and the narrative we see is a tiny, linear snippet of time in her life. Why then, do I empathise with her so deeply when I don’t really know anything about her? Baker completely disregards character writing 101, build a backstory, make them relatable, and create someone the audience can root for – or does he? What we do have of Ani is a reactionary character. Sure, we can infer a backstory of hideous strip-club encounters, perhaps a misshapen childhood or family situation, but it’s just that – we infer it. Baker is a portrait painter, giving us an image of a person in a certain instant; he shows but doesn’t tell.  

By saying so little, he gives us so much.  

Anora felt like Sean was acting as a wildlife photographer hiding in the shrubbery, watching a woodland creature caught in a bear trap. A disciplined Voyeur, he never intervenes or comes to her aid with any narrative devices or miraculous endings. Instead, he leaves her to fend for herself, and we, the audience - white-knuckled and helpless - watch her struggle to decide whether to squirm herself to death or gnaw off a limb.