Anora

Sean Baker’s Palme d’Or winning new film Anora marries old-school film craft to a tale of shallow zoomers hurting each other. Does it work?

Sean Baker’s Anora is brilliantly acted and beautifully shot on 35mm film, but at its core it must be one of the bleakest and emptiest movies ever made. Assuming that’s deliberate, should we celebrate it? The film won the Palme d’Or at Cannes, but France will always love films that say America is shallow and evil. It made no money at the box office, but that’s no surprise either. The question is who had the better instincts then, the elite of French cinema or the average American moviegoer?

Anora is the story of a young stripper who becomes the obsession of a 21-year-old Russian, Vanya, with a billionaire oligarch father. He falls in love with her, or at least with the idea of a carefree sex-filled life in America, and she falls in love with him, or at least with the idea of penthouses and trips to Vegas. They get married and his parents respond by sending Armenian henchmen to have the marriage forcibly annulled. When the Armenians arrive—early in the film—Anora’s new husband folds instantly and Anora has to face the fact their relationship was a chimera and she’s heading back to a life of stripping, cramped apartments and annoying roommates.

What makes things bleak is Anora’s slow realization she’s lied to herself about loving Vanya for anything more than the Instagram-friendly image of success he represents. What makes things really bleak is the way it doesn’t look like she’d know how to love anything else. They both turn out to be empty in the end. She wants him mainly for the feeling she gets walking out of the strip club for the last time and seeing the envy of the other dancers. He wants her until he sees her through his parents’ eyes and then he can barely stand to look at her.

And how do we see them? We see them through Sean Baker’s eyes, detached and amused. To the film’s credit, it’s very funny. But there’s a cost to this. You don’t get depressed by the best works of art, even when they’re about really dark subjects, because they have a way of showing you things you’ve never seen before that make the world make more sense. Anora doesn’t do this. Not with its main characters at least. The perspective of the film is too far from Anora and Vanya to see anything really surprising in them. The closer it looks at them, the less there is behind their eyes. It’s the cynical Armenian henchmen who feel closest to Baker’s perspective, and they’re the ones who feel like real, rounded characters. This is the kind of film they would make about everything that happened, not the kind Anora or Vanya would imagine.

Compare this with Robert Altman’s M*A*S*H. That’s a film that feels just as much of a need to keep you laughing throughout, but in M*A*S*H the comedy comes from Donald Sutherland and Elliot Gould’s own response to the insanity of war. The result is that each joke is a chance to see further into their characters. In Anora, the comedy is totally alien to Anora and Vanya, so it just feels like a distraction from the fact the film doesn’t really know them. This is why the film ultimately feels as bleak as it does, too bleak to be redeemed by beautiful, gritty cinematography and excellent acting.