Anora: A fairytale without a spark
I have been dying to see Anora since it won the Palme d’Or in Cannes. The premise is quite interesting “a stripper meets a Russian young son of an oligarch and it’s love at first sight”. Dubbed as a more provocative Pretty Woman and the romance of the year, the hype was real. I was also wondering what that would say of modern Russia considering the ongoing conflict.
I found it surprising a film that includes Russia would win such a prize in these years so I thought it must be quite a thing. I finally caught it at one of the last screenings in Edinburgh as the film was only screened for a few weeks in UK cinemas.
The opening scene is set in the strip club Anora works at and you see some of the workers giving dances to their clients. Some close ups on their body. It was a strange choice to objectify women’s bodies from the first second of the film, which was supposed to be about a woman. I should not have been surprised as although it is called Anora, this film is truly about Ivan.
Anora is only the plot device to shine a light on Ivan, his family and their difficult relationship. Whether it is Anora or one of her colleagues doesn’t change anything. She only got the gig because she speaks Russian. Later in the film when Ivan comes back to the club and Diamond, Anora’s nemesis, dances for him, it confirms it didn’t really matter which woman it was. He doesn’t even really care if she speaks Russian although he requested it again.
At least, Pretty Woman was a love story. This is clearly not. Where Pretty Woman starts with clearly established boundaries and later in the film, the crossing of those boundaries signals the feelings that the characters started to develop for each other. In Anora, there are never clear boundaries.
From the beginning, there are several instances where Anora goes “this is forbidden but I like you”. We learn she is an exotic dancer but then accepts for Ivan to be paid for sex without clearly establishing boundaries. Even when he asks her to be his girlfriend for the week, the price is discussed but not what’s included. When he invites her to his NYE party, he expects her to be available for him. He very much treats her as his property, to do as he pleases because he pays for it. He never really treats her like a human being.
Mickey Madison is extremely charismatic. But Ivan offers no chemistry. There is no romance or feelings. She enjoys the money and he enjoys her company. It is very much a business arrangement. Whether you compare it to Pretty Woman or Cinderella, in both of those stories, the couple was in love.
Because the romance beyond the transactional nature of this relationship is never truly established, it is surprising to think Anora would head into a marriage that his parents don’t approve of without any insurance of being taken care of. She is an extremely smart woman and this seems very much out of character.
We are only ever offered snippets of Anora in the context of her relationships with men. The only significant relationships she has with women is her good friend at the club and her nemesis Diamond. Their conversations are constantly about the men at the club, Ivan, the jealousy one feels about how men perceive the women.
This film does not pass the Bechdel test in any way. In itself, I don’t expect films about relationships to always pass it. But in this case, the distribution of information is not equal. We know everything about Ivan, his family, his life, his friends but nothing about her. This film missed the opportunity to add an interesting layer.
She comes from a family whose Russian grandparents immigrated to the US. She lives with her sister. Where are her parents? What do they think of her marriage? With her knowledge of Russian culture, why did she not think about his parents not trying to use their power to get rid of her? It would have been a great opportunity to explore her character within that relationship. The differences between two people sharing a culture but one of them grew up in the US and the other in Russia.
Instead she is very much a plot device for Ivan’s story. From the moment they meet, he is the one pushing the narrative. His demands bring Anora into his life. His money keeps her coming back. Even his proposal is all for himself so he can stay in the US. Green card marriages are not only happening in the US.
But this has a price and the fact that she negotiated so well up until then makes it weirder that her future and her protecting herself doesn’t come on the table as she quits her job for him. They seem happy but it does all look like an arrangement and feels like one. She gets stability and luxury, he gets companionship and eventually a green card. When his parents get involved, again it’s Ivan running away that pushes the narrative. She is the literal hostage of the narrative. She loses all agency.
Alongside that, the film feels tonally confused. It starts like a drama. I never got the romcom vibes, as the attraction and feelings growing was never established in the film. Anora never thinks they are now a couple. Until he proposes, which he makes clear is because he wants to stay in America, she is working for him. He pays her for her services.
Love or anything they might feel towards each other was never shown or said. The closest thing was that the proposal was a serious proposal. I have seen other reviews say Anora is a screwball comedy but screwball comedies are a subgenre of the romantic comedy.
The comedy does come once Ivan’s dad's henchmen literally enter the frame. From now on, it’s a patchwork of physical comedy, grotesque situations and witty one liners. This weird line up of two henchmen, their boss and Anora makes for a funny situation. The juxtaposition of the baptism Torros is at with his two henchmen trying to handle the situation at Ivan’s house is very funny.
There are many more absurd situations to come which does make it feel more like a comedy. But I would at best consider it as a dramatic comedy as its ending is very brutal for Anora. From Anora’s perspective this is all a tragedy. The prophecy Diamond threw at her the day she quit the club “she’ll be back. It won’t last two weeks” is becoming true and she literally can’t do anything about it.
From Ivan’s perspective, this is all a comedy. He doesn’t care for the consequences. He runs away from his house, his dad’s henchmen and abandons his wife to drink himself into oblivion and then goes back to the club Anora’s used to work at. This shows how little consideration he has for his wife and how there was never love to begin with. It also reinforces how much this story is about him not her - despite her being the titular character.
Most headlines say it’s a spin on a Cinderella tale. But even in Cinderella’s story, Cinderella is the main character. She goes to the ball, she loses her shoe and has to free herself from the dungeon to try the shoe. We know everything about Cinderella and her circumstances. We experience the story from her perspective which is not the case.
There wasn’t even enough time for Anora to be Cinderella. It would have been more of a Cinderella story if the couple ran away together trying to escape the parents long enough for them to not be able to get their way with Ivan.
Even the ending is not making Anora justice. She tries to initiate a sexual encounter with the man that has been guarding her the whole time. Then to cry. The crying makes sense but the sex scene feels totally gratuitous especially as there’s never been an attempt to establish any attraction between them.
Sean Baker missed the mark as the best moment in this film was her standing in front of the plane saying “I won’t get on the plane. We will get a divorce and I never signed a prenup.” Galina, Ivan’s mum, threatens her. It fades to black and then we jump back to when she is on the plane. How did she get on the plane? Why did the threats work? She has nothing so nothing to lose.
It was such an important moment in the narrative as it was the first time she was able to regain agency and then it was ignored and a fade to black used to not have to explain how they convinced her to get on that plane. That would have been an excellent ending with them seeing each other in court.
Obviously, the film ends with his family getting their way. Ivan never apologising and treating her as a naive girl as if this was always a week arrangement. She has been very clearly done dirty in every way. But the story is tied up and ends with Anora going back to her previous house. The story ends where she began. But she was never an active participant of this story. She is more a collateral damage.
I did some research on the origin of this film as I was wondering if it mattered he was Russian, if there was a statement about the current situation but it doesn’t seem so. The film was inspired by a story of Sean Baker’s friend where the groom was Russian and the bride was kidnapped as collateral. It was also inspired by some of the Russian American wedding videos he used to edit. It was a bit disappointing as some of the pitfalls could have been avoided or fixed with a tighter narrative actually centred around Anora and less objectification of her character.