Anora (2024) opens with a montage of Ani, a 23-year-old sex worker from Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, hustling clientele at the strip club where she’s employed. from the tinsel in her hair to her butterfly manicure, she performs a manic pixie edge as object of desire for the men at HQ club. her sharp tongue is tucked away for the moment. that will come later. for her cold open, she’s pretty and petite and sweet. service with a smile. a mere five minutes pass and the repetition of her work cannot be missed… the back-and-forth between hitching a new and nervous customer, fetching cocktails, the heavy petting and eventual hand-in-hand to VIP. the same clothes, day in day out. like clockwork.
No doubt that Ani is good at her job: she has a way of decentering money from the heart of the transaction. she performs desire so seamlessly that the function of tipping seems automatic; then men are so lost in acts of service that they hardly notice a hundred, or two, or three has left their wallets. through Ani’s eyes, we see her grant a powerful permission to please and be pleased. we see her play out the paradox of ‘wanting’ that may be authentic or completely not. (she pokes fun at the incompetence of some of the men post-session, in the break room with coworkers).
Then in comes Vanya, the 21-year-old son of an obscenely rich Russian oligarch. the two hit it off, and it changes everything. in more ways than one do we see this relationship slowly peeling back the layers of Ani toward ‘Anora.’ when she’s gently pushed by Vanya to speak in Russian, her mother tongue. Ani smiling to her ears after bringing him to finish, over and over. smiling because she’s just that good at her job. smiling because out of her own pleasure and volition. smiling because she’s so good at the pleasing that in turn she’s pleased herself by just how good- the nuances in Mikey Madison and Mark Eydelshteyn’s portrayals are pitch-perfect. their on-screen chemistry is a bottle rocket. it has you questioning, what is really real in romance anyway?
Then there are moments where you simply fall for the love story- Ani and Vanya- because they are just so damn goofy together, in his halfway slang dictionary English and her forgotten Russian tongue-in-cheek. what is romance anyway but a language strung between two people? somersaulting out of bed from near virginal excitement. as he pops the question and takes her in his arms down the casino halls of Vegas, Greatest Day, a synthy edm power ballad, pins down this euphoric peak (it’s a Robin Schulz edit on a U.K. boyband track). this flutter of firework and flying is what becomes the snapshot on the movie’s promotional poster- with Ani on a high she’s maybe never felt before, and a long way down to fall.
As their honeymoon phase builds to fade, there’s shades of deeper discourse on the politics of shame, desirability, assault. there’s room for responsive desire and consent models beyond enthusiastic consent. in post metoo, it’s nuance rare to come by and all the more rarely elevated.
In a culture that posits sex work as exclusively exploitative, that same culture is as adamant to find new ways to exploit those it deems as ‘victims.’ Anora actualizes this, to the end that Ani won’t get her Cinderella ending. the breakdown of Ani’s self-awareness, following the dissolution of her and Vanya’s romance, confronts the viewer with hard and hollow truths. truths behind generational wealth, and the limits to sex as a means to power in today’s (ever-changing, but far from liberated) american dream machine. fast-forward past the screwball comic middle, and you’re met with the final image. you get the sense that Ani is one kind of girl at the start, and come the last scene of the movie, you might feel like you don’t know her at all. and the tear-splitting truth there is that Ani is at much of a loss as you are.
Anora leaves me with an intangible feeling, one that strikes an emotional core like no other feminist-adjacent media has done in recent memory. i feel something fundamentally true to the feminine condition in Madison’s performance as Ani/Anora. and i can’t unfeel it, despite the months that go by since seeing this movie. and so the best of 2024 lingers on into the new year.