Sena Nurhan Duran: Sean Baker has discussed the centrality of location in his films at length. The San Fernando Valley of Starlet, Tangerine’s Los Angeles, the motel and consuming shadow of the titular The Florida Project, and the expanse of Texas City in Red Rocket serve as main characters in his films in their own right. Intertwined with his interest as a filmmaker of sex work narratives, this direction (usually) offers a vibrant exploration of his characters’ labor, desires, and motivations in and through their intimacies with the locale around them. In Tangerine, for instance, it is on and with the streets of L.A. that Alexandra and Sin-Dee do their work, run into and call across to friends, enter conflict (read: beat up on Dinah), and reconcile. 

We are given glimpses of this intimacy at the start of Anora. Following Mikey Madison as Anora (“Ani”) a Brighton Beach-based dancer who falls into a whirlwind romance with young Russian oligarch Ivan, the film reveals a striking mid-point tonal shift when the disapproval of Ivan’s parents leads to his abandonment of his new wife, leading to a cat-and-mouse chase for Ivan by his henchmen and Ani. At the film’s introduction, we watch Ani navigate the space of the Headquarters strip club where she works with familiar ease. Cuts of her in between private dance and room sessions—hitting her pen while looking for new customers, a mid-shift dinner break in the club locker room where she and friend Lulu vent about the DJ—give us brief flickers of Ani’s interior life as it emerges between and brushes up against the romantic and sexual labor of her work. In an especially tender moment, we follow Ani as she heads home after her shift in the cold of a late-December Brooklyn morning, falling asleep on her train.

But with the introduction of Ivan, Ani’s interaction with her environment becomes heavily restricted to the spaces of the ensemble cast—Ivan’s Brooklyn mansion, the impromptu private flight to and suite in Las Vegas, and the chase through the city to find Ivan preclude Ani’s familiarity or involvement with the city as anything besides frantic, cold, and impersonal. And in this move, Baker, subconsciously or not, shuts Ani out of her own story. In the absence of Ani’s navigation of sites external to the club as her own (her decision to leave work after marrying Ivan disappointingly shuns the club to the narrative backseat), the bounds of Ani’s physical space become claustrophobically directed by the more precise motivations of the other characters. Ivan’s desire for rebellion and his family’s decision that their relationship must be annulled result in Ani being moved through, rather than moving through, the Brighton Beach setting at the center of Baker’s vision. 

Our hold on her character, including what leads her to pursue and insist on the commitment of her newlywed husband despite his immediate abandonment of her, feels difficult to grasp. There are moments where we witness some hints as to what Ani might be thinking or want through her unease in space, as in when Baker pauses on her discomfort in remaining cuddled with Ivan while his housekeeper vacuums the floor beneath their feet. But these moments gesture to a potential inner conflict or curiosity (and potential class solidarity) that is swiftly dropped in favor of the return to the romantic setup of the first act. 

I am left missing Anora pre-Ivan—Anora from Brighton Beach, Anora at Headquarters—who glimmers through Madison’s (albeit undeniably devoted) performance but becomes lost in her search. 

****

Charline Jao: I find myself increasingly irritated at how the pull-quote media cycle talks about Anora: a modern-day Cinderella, an A24 Pretty Woman, a female Uncut Gems, etc. etc. Does Anora have interiority? Does she actually love Vanya? Was she naïve enough to believe in him? (The question I, personally, return to again and again: Should I get tinsel in my hair?) Anora doesn’t meet the heights of Working Girls or even Baker’s previous film Red Rocket and their frank portrayals of sex work, nor does the female “interiority” question feel as provocative here as it does in films like Vagabond or Wanda. Nevertheless, the interesting thing about Anora is how much our protagonist does or does not recognize existing scripts of romance and marriage as contracts and systems of exchange: the brief reference to Disneyland and Cinderella in the first half, her negotiations with client/husband Vanya, and the discussions in the second half of the film with Vanya’s family and hired help. The adrenaline rush of Sean Baker’s film is all managed through a playful, and then furious enforcement of terms and conditions. After Vanya’s family and their hired muscle try to correct Vanya’s impulsive decision to marry Ani, we see the breakdown of negotiations when Toros changes the term to the cost of a green card marriage. Just as Ani practices her Russian to try and become a part of Vanya’s family (and her mother-in-law’s scoff when she tries to introduce herself in what was clearly a diligently-rehearsed introduction is almost as brutal as Vanya’s dismissal while boarding the plane), she tries out other methods—appealing to the New York City judge, and very briefly, threatening to fight for a bigger cut in a divorce. Unfortunately, as the annulment plays out, Ani doesn’t even get to play the role of spurned (and rich) ex-wife. Instead, she returns home exactly where she started (and emotionally worse off).

The final scene in the car is exciting (and polarizing) precisely because of this mess of romance and mediation. When Igor presents the engagement ring he swiped to Ani at the film’s conclusion, we have all the components of a proposal—it’s almost a reversal of Vanya’s no-ring, stay-in-America proposal—but we have absolutely no terms. Igor’s silence suggests that there is no expected reciprocation, but the sex between the two that follows doesn’t exactly feel like romance. The physicality of this scene recalls both their first meeting (kicking and fighting on the couch) and Ani’s dances at the strip club, but the grappling as Ani refuses to kiss him and her collapse into tears tell us that something else is happening. While the rest of the film is filled with characters telling Ani what she’s getting or not getting, neither the characters or the audience know what this moment means for the two. It’s not a comfortable scene, which is exactly the point! I can still hear those windshield wipers. 

****

Sophie Marie Niang: I was ready to love Anora. The opening credits, set to “Greatest Day” by Take That, drenched in red and indigo lights, took me in. I rejoiced in the ensemble’s performance, absurd and hilarious, in Mikey Madison’s brilliant acting, in the shots of the Brighton Beach boardwalk. So the ending—in which Ani has sex with Ivan in his car before breaking down in tears, the film closing with the sound of the car’s windshield wipers repeatedly thumping—enraged me, exposing the shallowness and ultimately reactionary nature of Baker’s film. 

I understand the desire for an unsettling conclusion, one that refuses to neatly tie up this story. Baker steered clear of more conventional endings (no unexpected revenge or fairy tale here) but his choice was entirely unsatisfying. In discussions about Anora, I most disagree with justifications of the ending that insist the film needed to acknowledge explicitly that this whole experience was tragic for Ani, and that the only way to do that was to show her tears. Implying that this emotional breakdown is the only possible way to access Ani’s interiority, this perspective also carries reactionary undertones: Ani is a sex worker therefore she believes the only valuable thing she has to offer is her body, therefore naturally she fucks Ivan to settle the transaction after he’s rescued her engagement ring. But the ethical muddiness of this transaction undoes her, touches something deep inside her, and she breaks down sobbing on his lap. This reasoning captures Baker’s profound lack of empathy, along with his ultimately conservative ideas about sex work and interpersonal relationships.

All the points that this awful final scene belabours are already contained, somewhat more subtly, in prior scenes in the movie. When Ani and Igor are watching TV during her final night in Vanya’s dream house, she tells him that she knows he wanted to rape her on that first day. Ani’s desire to bring that episode up in a flippant, adolescent manner, set against Igor’s genuine incomprehension—his inability to apprehend the violence he inflicted upon her due to his conviction that he was protecting her from worse—betrays her trauma, despite her efforts to feign indifference. The audience might have forgotten about it (this in itself a damning indictment of Baker’s filmmaking), but she hasn’t. 

Later, in the car, after Igor returns the ring to her, the camera lingers on her face, Madison’s gaze shifting slightly. A truly eerie, unsettling ending would have closed on that gaze, leaving the audience to ponder, to sit uncomfortably. But ultimately, Baker’s ending is not a failure (thanks to my friend Ali for this angle). It reveals the mean-hearted center and profoundly conservative underbelly of his movie. I wish the film had let me read a tale of refusal and class solidarity, an ode to New York and complicated diasporas, into its ridiculous, haphazard, and deeply funny moments. But Baker’s true loyalties come to light, and they do not lie with those whose lives he portrays.

****

Marcus Prasad: Sean Baker’s Palme d’Or-winning screwball comedy, Anora, is the perfect example of what I mean when I say, “movies are so back.” But a lot of people don’t seem to agree! To preface, I was thrilled when, about midway through the film, I felt I could make the choice to stop gleaning critical thoughts from what I was seeing and just enjoy the movie for where it was taking me. When I say “movies are so back,” I mean that I feel like I can lose myself in what’s on screen and momentarily enjoy a kind of cinematic escape—it’s nice to turn off your brain sometimes and tap into a more laid-back mode of movie-watching where we didn’t feel like we had to dissect every representation lodged at us. But this is where a lot of the less-than-two-star review writers on letterboxd seem to close in: what responsibility does Baker’s film hold toward equitably and dynamically portraying Anora, a dancer moonlighting as a sex worker under the purview of a comedy? 

Of course, critical analysis of what we’re watching on screen is essential to addressing the complexity of figuring those who are underrepresented, especially in a film that has won the highest honour at the Cannes film festival. It is, however, also important to remember that films do not have to spell out everything for its audiences—I firmly believe that didacticism fosters inauthenticity and coddles its viewers. For example, one letterboxd user gave the film half a star, noting that they “kept waiting for some explication about Anora’s life or motivations. Like why does she avoid speaking Russian? What are her relationships with other people? But of course, like The Substance, it is just another film that enjoys subjecting women to endless humiliations.” The reference made to Fargeat’s film from earlier in 2024 illustrates their opening take a bit further: “it’s all surface and no depth.” 

But what if shallowness isn’t automatically a bad thing? I think that if we assume a binary opposition between complexity and simplicity, it reinforces the idea of a perfect form of representation somewhere out there—everything else that doesn’t meet that mark is simply not worthy of critical consideration. Not only does this perspective place an undue burden on Baker’s film to teach viewers about the socio-political context of stripping and sex work in a palatable, educational package, but it also proffers a closed-minded attitude that films must always actively subvert negative representations, rather than incorporate more difficult content to describe and make known a current state of affairs. 

If we laud or condemn films for being either progressive or regressive, we move away from the potential of that juicy in-between, where ambiguity fosters the most interesting interpretations. I’m not saying we should all be bowing down to Sean Baker, but we can, at the very least, fill in a perceived lack of depth with our own external research and understanding. If viewers can get past the need to have Anora herself monologue a justification for why she deserves to be treated like a person, we might also be open to doing some of our own interpretive work beyond the surface of the film to consider what it is saying about representation at large. 

So, when I say “movies are so back,” I’m advocating for a particular kind of laid-back attitude—not a refusal of critique, but a wading in ambiguity that does not ask to have every question answered by what’s on screen in a two-hour timeframe. Watching a movie is a two-way street, where some work has to be reciprocated. If audiences take what we’re seeing at face value without any space for thought or extrapolation beyond the cinematic text, maybe we’re the ones failing to articulate depth.

Article thumbnail photo credit: Universal Pictures

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