As a huge fan of Sean Baker’s Tangerine, The Florida Project, and Red Rocket, I’ve wanted to watch Anora since before it even was released. But life got in the way, my watchlist grew, and honestly, the fact that it was marketed as a romantic comedy put me off. Even with all the critical praise and the five Academy Awards it won last year, I just kept postponing it indefinitely.
As a huge fan of Sean Baker’s Tangerine, The Florida Project, and Red Rocket, I’ve wanted to watch Anora since before it even was released. But life got in the way, my watchlist grew, and honestly, the fact that it was marketed as a romantic comedy put me off. Even with all the critical praise and the five Academy Awards it won last year, I just kept postponing it indefinitely.
When Netflix added it last week, I finally took the plunge and watched it. Now I realize that I’ve been letting my genre bias keep me away from what is easily one of the best films of the last ten years. And while I’m aware I might look down on romantic comedies because they’re usually riddled with clichés, I’ve never held any prejudice against sex workers, who are always at the heart of Sean Baker’s stories. It’s actually the main reason I love his work so much; he treats the subject with real compassion and genuine respect.
The story follows Ani, the granddaughter of Russian immigrants who works as a dancer at a Manhattan strip club. That’s where she meets Vanya, the 21-year-old son of a Russian oligarch, who pays her a considerable sum of money to be his exclusive companion for a week. If that sounds familiar, it’s because the exact same thing happened in Pretty Woman.
By the end of the week, while in Vegas, Vanya proposes. They have absolutely nothing in common besides a transactional relationship, but Ani recognizes the opportunity to get out of her situation, and she takes it. Marrying a rich guy is the ultimate escape fantasy when you’re a girl and grew up poor reading fairy tales. Even her co-workers compare her to Cinderella and tell her she won the lottery, which just shows how badly women in this industry want a similar chance to change their lives.
But the red flags about the reality of her marriage pop up immediately: Vanya doesn’t actually have any money of his own. His parents bankroll his entire life, and the mansion they stay in is in his parents’ name. He doesn’t even own his own future, since he’s supposed to head back to Russia to work for his dad in a week’s time. Looking at his circumstances closely, you realize that Vanya is also just running away from his own reality. He marries Ani on a whim to try and grab some independence and gain control over his life and his decisions.
The fantasy falls apart when his parents send their New York employees to get the marriage annulled. When state laws block them, the parents literally fly in from Russia to drag Ani and Vanya back to Vegas to get their marriage annulled and kill their dream. That’s when Ani has to face the brutal truth: she married an immature kid with no will of his own, and her “easy way out” was just an illusion of her own making.
I also saw this desire to escape reality in how she insists on going by Ani instead of her full name, Anora. She uses the nickname to distance herself from her background as the granddaughter of poor immigrants. To her, “Ani” sounds completely American: confident, strong, and self-reliant. Using Ani instead of Anora lets her forget her actual financial struggles and helps her feel like she has a real shot at the American Dream.
I cried my eyes out at the end, and I really don’t think this belongs in the comedy category at all. It’s a straight-up drama. Yes, a few scenes are hilarious, but the humor comes from the characters’ genuine reactions to their messy and real situations, not from cheesy and over-the-top jokes I’m almost always expecting from the genre. The romance is also misleading. At first, you think the movie is about the love story gone wrong between Ani and Vanya, but the real emotional core is the quiet connection that builds in the background between her and one of the thugs sent by Vanya’s parents to clean up his mess.
Anora totally caught me off guard. While Ani was trying to escape the harsh realities of her life, I was escaping my own mindset that the romantic comedy genre has nothing left to say. And as she tried to take a shortcut out of poverty, I also took my own shortcut by writing off an entire genre because of its bad apples.
