BONUS: 'Anora' Has the Perfect Balance of Sweetness and Cynicism

I miss the Russian part of Brooklyn

NEON

Anora is not the kind of movie I’d usually cover on Dad Shows, but I went to a press screening earlier this week and I feel compelled to write a little something about this movie, which I enjoyed very much and is something are actually talking about, unlike most of the shows I cover. So welcome to the first-ever Dad Shows bonus post, which has nothing to do with Dad Shows, though we’ll see if I can somehow tie a Dad Shows theme into it. 

(Spoilers for Anora, if you care.)

When I lived in Brooklyn, I liked to go to the Russian part of town every now and then. I have fond memories of jumping in the ocean at Brighton Beach on New Year’s Day and going to Roll N Roaster in Sheepshead Bay for roast beef sandwiches. It feels like a different country and a different era down there. The parts of Brooklyn I was usually in were gentrifying or fully gentrified neighborhoods. Southern Brooklyn is gentrification-proof. Nobody hip lives there. The main characters in Anora are young and attractive, but they’re not cool in the way self-aware, media-savvy, creative-class people who move to Brooklyn usually try to be. Ani and Vanya and Igor exist in a different world, the uncool New York of Safdie Brothers movies where people are rude and scrappy like it’s still 1977. Anora made me miss New York. Riding in my friend’s car to southern Brooklyn and parking under elevated train tracks. 

The best thing about Anora is its empathy. Writer-director-editor Sean Baker loves all of his characters and understands where they’re coming from, even when everything they do is selfish and self-seeking. They’re not bad people, they’re just fucked up and doing what they have to do to get by. Nothing they do comes from a place of malice. We forgive them all. It’s not really their fault. Capitalism makes people insane. Ani is alienated from her own body and soul because her very existence is labor. All of her relationships are transactional. She’s selling sex, but’s she’s really selling access to her time and her attention and her beauty and her spirit. After we left the theater, my friend and I spent a while discussing why Ani cries in the last scene, and I was having trouble articulating exactly what I thought, because it’s a complex scene. But upon further reflection, it’s because Igor is the only person in the movie who does not treat her transactionally, but she is so conditioned that she can only respond to him transactionally. Sex is all she knows to offer. And I think it hits her in that moment, when she’s faced with sincere care and affection, that her concept of love is fubar. In her heart she’s a Disney princess, but her material reality means she has to trade on men wanting to fuck her. And this moment with Igor, coming at the end of this unbelievably intense whirlwind experience she’s just been through, finally breaks her. She can’t project toughness anymore. 

Anora is an intimate and simple story, but it has a lot of depth to it. You don’t necessarily notice the depth while you’re watching it, but it comes out when you’re thinking about it afterward. It has a simultaneous sweetness and cynicism that’s perfectly balanced through the whole film. Neither ever overpowers the other. Everyone is trying their best, but surviving is hard work. 

Damn, I didn’t tie it back to Dad Shows. Umm…if your dad was a Russian oligarch, you’d be messed up, too.

Back to our regular scheduled programming next week.