Anora

it's giving samey

*THIS REVIEW CONTAINS A BUNCH OF SPOILERS BBZ*

Ani, my love.

I was so ready for you to show me who you were — beyond the lights, beneath the lace, outside the male gaze.

And there were glimpses.

When you rode the train home, headphones on, eyelids collapsed. The sunrise staining the New York skyline a sleepy orange. The milk you didn’t fucking pick up. And my favourite moment: when the service Vanya paid for was complete and you dropped the facade because you had shit to do. Calling Vanya “dude” was a nice touch.

But that’s pretty much where it ended.

From then on, Ani existed almost exclusively at the whims of the men around her. Vanya. Toros. Garnik. Igor. And we were only allowed to see Ani through their eyes, which is exclusively where her value (or lack of) came from.

First, there’s Vanya: obscenely rich, 21 years old, and the face of a literal high schooler. He becomes smitten with Ani the way a child fixates on a shiny new toy (Ani also has shiny tinsel like glitter in her hair. Coincidence?).

Then there’s Igor, framed as Vanya’s opposite. Working-class. Quiet. Observant.

The fairytale versus the supposedly grounded truth. The truth that Ani also is painfully aware of since there’s this half-baked prevailing sentiment that Igor and Ani are one and the same, and that’s how he’s able to see her. (cue I see you by Leona Lewis).

The familiar trope: the flashy, superficial boy versus the introspective ‘nice guy’.

Except Igor isn’t a nice guy. He assaults Ani. He follows orders. He is complicit.

And yet the film wants us to see him as the hero.

There’s a quote I keep thinking about:
“The best man you know is the average woman.”

It’s painfully relevant here. During the night they spend in the mansion, Ani asks him, “Why wouldn’t you have raped me?” His reply: “Because I’m not a rapist.”

And that’s the bar.

Not raping a woman becomes a moral achievement. A test passed. We’re meant to exhale in relief because we were holding our breath waiting for the suss response of ‘because I’m not attracted to you, I don’t like you that way’ etc.

It’s as if the absence of violence is the same thing as virtue.

The film is riddled with this kind of shallow framing. Even its aesthetics feel obvious. There’s a montage of Ani and Vanya living their best life, scored by the most predictable, palateable 2010s-esque song choice imaginable.

It plays like a glossy advert.

And I kept wondering: is this intentional? Is it irony? Or is it that audiences need familiar tropes spoon-fed because half of us watch films/tv phone in hand.

Because what Anora often feels like is a fetishisation of sex work — the perspective of someone who has a vague idea of what the job entails, no meaningful relationships within the community, and no real interest in engaging with its realities. An outsider looking in. One idea taken at face value and aestheticised.

It’s voyeurism. The collapse of nuance.

Like walking past Harrods’ Christmas window display and marvelling at the spectacle, never once considering the workers behind it — the skipped lunches, the sourced 3.5-by-2.6-inch gold-rimmed baubles, the windows dusted in precisely timed 1.4-second bursts of artificial snow.

Anora is literally titled after its protagonist, yet it isn’t about Anora in her own right. It’s about what happens to her. She becomes a surface upon which male desire, violence, boredom, and power are projected and played out.

This voyeuristic impulse feels even more glaring when you consider Sean Baker’s Red Rocket (2021).

I should probably have rewatched it before writing this, but what’s striking in hindsight is how much depth Sean affords Mikey, Simon Rex’s washed-up porn star character, compared to Ani. Mikey is selfish, manipulative, and predatory. He uses people, almost exclusively women, to get what he wants. And yet, he is rendered with coherence.

Mikey returns to his hometown and pressures his estranged wife and her mother into letting him live with them. They reluctantly agree, on the condition that he gets a job and contributes to the household like the grown man he is. He can’t hold down work, so he drifts back into his high school job – selling weed (the drug dealer who lets him sell is a woman and her second in command is her daughter). And then there’s Strawberry: a 17-year-old girl working at a doughnut shop. He becomes infatuated with her. They enter a sexual relationship. He tries to convince her to move to LA so he can manage her porn career — to exploit a child for profit.

It’s grotesque. And it’s clear.

What Red Rocket does well is show the ripple effect of Mikey’s behaviour. We see how his actions impact the women around him — all of whom give him chances he does not deserve. His arc makes sense. You briefly root for him, and then he proves, again and again, that he is exactly who he is. A fuck-up who keeps fucking up. A predator who burns every bridge in pursuit of his own gratification.

There’s no mismatch between who he is and what the film allows him to do.

Mikey has depth, even if that depth reveals him to be a massive piece of shit.

And that’s the point.

Sean Baker was able to write a male character whose inner logic holds, whose contradictions feel real, whose behaviour aligns with his circumstances and history. He wasn’t able to do the same for Anora.

The Pretty Woman comparisons are obvious: rich man, sex worker, modern Cinderella fantasy. The film even nods to it explicitly. There’s a line early on — “You know, I would’ve done it for ten.” And the response, delivered in Russian: “If I were you, I wouldn’t do it for less than thirty.” It’s a wink. The film says, “I understand the trope I’m playing with.”

But this is 2024. If you’re going to invoke Pretty Woman now, you have a responsibility to interrogate that shit, flip it on its head.

What we should have seen is Anora evolving from someone briefly seduced by the fairytale into someone who realises she doesn’t need to attach herself to a man to secure her future. That she can build her own American dream.

That the fantasy was never the man, or the money, or the ring. It was the promise of relief but she is perfectly capable of relieving herself (lol unfortunate wording).

But no. We get basic. We get thrifted scaffolding from Pretty Woman with a sprinkle of whatever Sean thought Hustlers was, and the result is an underwhelming, samey story.

Imagine if, when Igor took her home, she spat in his face and carried her own bags inside.

Imagine if the final scene showed Anora sitting across from Jimmy saying:
“I’ve got 10–15k from that sham marriage. Let me invest. I want X% of the club. Let’s do this properly and get the girls 401(K)s and healthcare.”

That ending would have honoured the street-smart woman the film keeps telling us Ani is.

Because here’s the thing: a working-class woman in sex work, living where Ani lives, surviving how she survives, would not tolerate what she tolerates in this film for as long as she does without having an agenda, without her resourcefulness kicking in.

It does not ring true.

Don’t keep telling me Ani is one thing but showing me another.

Yes, Ani wants the fairytale. She wants her American dream. When Vanya proposes and she snaps, “Don’t fucking tease me with that shit, okay?” It’s because she understands the carrot being dangled in front of her. This marriage would change her life instantly. But she also knows that fairytales don’t happen.

Not in her world.

You see that same instinct when the facade drops the morning after Vanya’s credit runs out. “No, dude — I have to go to work.” And you see it when Jimmy tries to deny her a holiday and she shuts him down immediately: “Once you give me health insurance, workers’ comp, and a fucking 401(k), then you can tell me when I work.” She knows her value. She knows exactly what he makes off her body. And she refuses to let him pretend otherwise.

But she’s 23. She works hard for her money. Her livelihood is not a cushy 9–5 with paid sick leave and wfh days. So of course she wants to be swept up.

But Vanya isn’t capable of picking up anything other than a $100 bill to snort lines.

A nonchalant, indulgent child, raised the way many men who now run countries were raised: excused from labour, insulated from consequence, constantly appeased. He says something tender — “I think we’d have a great time even if I didn’t have money” — and for a second you think, maybe I misjudged him. Then he follows it immediately with: “And I’ll become American, and my parents will suck my dick.”

That’s the truth. Spoilt. Selfish. And using Ani as a means to an end.

We see Ani get angry. We see her bristle. She reads Vanya’s mother to filth, a moment I thoroughly enjoyed. We see flashes of the woman who is sharp, resourceful, and capable of making things happen in real time. But none of that anger goes anywhere. It never does anything.

There’s no reckoning.

She should have been the one to get the ring back for herself.

I thought I’d meet Anora (or Ani as she prefers). I thought I’d see Ani through her own eyes, because only then would I get depth

Honestly, I’m asking for the bare minimum: a film titled Anora that is actually about Anora.