Tangerine is one of my favorite movies of all time. As you can imagine, I was very excited to see Anora and was pretty thrilled that the Coolidge Corner Theater (the best theater in New England, btw) was showing it in 35mm. I left my screening, however, rather underwhelmed.
Would I have liked it more without all the hype and lowered expectations? This is a constant debate I have, and I try to be self-aware enough to steel myself for any outcome when I watch a movie, whether new or old or classic or near-forgotten. One of the joys of moviewatching is having no expectations and getting unexpectedly blown away. There’s nothing like throwing something on and then finding yourself engrossed, in tears, deeply touched, and/or forever changed.
With The Florida Project, the first and likely only Sean Baker movie the average theater-goer has previously caught, the American director posits a young girl’s impoverished childhood on the edge of the Happiest Place on Earth. It’s nowhere near as combative of a movie as Tangerine or Red Rocket, with one foot in the Floridian poverty of its characters and one in Moonee’s childhood dreamworld, and while I think it’s an incredible movie, when I think of Baker’s accomplishments I think of the former. Tangerine and Red Rocket have an almost inimitable, simmering energy. A high compliment I can give: I think they’re very much the children of After Hours. There’s calmer and quieter moments, but these characters are on a mission. They touch upon tenderness, but the barrage is overwhelming. I really, really like that, and I think it’s difficult to make a movie that nearly leaves you breathless.
What Anora has in common with The Florida Project is why it doesn’t work for me. Moonee and Ani share the same vague shape… characters adrift in their story while the real world happens around them. The difference is that the former is a child, and the dreamlike glaze that spreads across her impoverished days is intentionally juxtaposed with Disney World. Ani, for all of her spunk and have-at-it-ness, feels as incomplete as that child. She has the inkling of a backstory, but no identifiable hopes and desires other than marrying the rich Russian who happened to wander into her club where she is the only one who speaks his language. She’s difficult to read, which I don’t inherently mind, but when I make my attempt to look deeper, I don’t come up with much.
I kept waiting for her to have a conniving side, to realize that what she’s managed to find is going to be hard to hold onto and that she would have to fight for it, but the film never takes Ani to another level. Unlike Sin-dee in Tangerine and Simon Rex in Red Rocket (and no, you don’t remember his character’s name either), a lot of the movie simply happens to Ani. She’s not the driving force, even though the whole thing is called Anora. She displays some gumption in securing the bag, her physical resistance to being held against her will, and her one last effort to threaten her in-laws before they make her get divorced, but that’s about it. It’s essential to film that the marriage is Vanya’s idea—the whole point is that the foundation of her Cinderella story is built on sand and that he’s just using her at his own convenience to get back at his parents. I understand that he's fond of her to a certain extent, and I think the same is true of her, but I never understood why she was so sure of herself.
The whole thing almost works, too. I very much like the idea of a Cinderella story shattered when harsh reality sets in, but I think one of the problems with Anora is that the audience sees it coming from a mile away and Ani doesn’t seem to get it until the last second, even after its been thrown in her face again and again. I don’t know how we’re supposed to understand her character, and I don’t mean that in a good way. It’s one thing for a protagonist to be multi-dimensional, realistic, and subsequently hard to read and another for one to just feel flat. In Red Rocket, Simon Rex is propelled by his own stupidity and ego—he knows he’s being manipulative when’s being intentional, but the important part is that he still thinks he’s going to win. Ani is just a character that things happen to. There’s a game she’s trapped in, but she doesn’t even seem to get it or have any idea how she got in. She works hard at the club and puts her number in his phone for outside contact, sure. She’s still an island. Her parents are barely in her life, she has a sister for some reason (I can’t come up with one for why this character takes up any screen time at all), she has one friend, and I guess the bouncer at the club likes her—other than that, she has a tenuous connection to the outside world. We can all assume she struggles with money, but how much? Did she always want to be a sex worker? Did she try to go to college or have a normal job? Or did she get into stripping immediately and stay there because she loves it so much? Or was meeting a rich man and locking it down always her goal? Did she love Vanya at all? He obviously sucks big time in the boyfriend/husband department—there’s enough scenes of her being ignored while he plays video games. Did she really expect him to stand up to his parents? Did she really think all of his money was his? WHY DO I HAVE SO MANY QUESTIONS ABOUT THE PROTAGONIST? WHY DOES SHE DITCH THE COAT THAT WAS PROBABLY WORTH AS MUCH AS HER RING?
Most of all, I feel as though this movie is disconnected from the inherent political association of Russian oligarch characters and the pitfalls of dips into massive wealth. My best friend is a Rusky from Brighton Beach, so I was looking forward to a nocturnal odyssey through that Brooklyn underbelly. You get a passing glance at it—someone less well-versed in American ethnic neighborhoods might wonder how they continuously come across so many native Russian speakers in just one city—but nothing interesting. For the second half of the movie, the specter of the arrival of Vanya’s parents haunts our characters, but when they finally arrive, the threat almost completely deflates. I think I was expecting something edgier from Baker, what with his liking of LibsofTikTok tweets and other flashier elements of the movie. There were no references to the Russian invasion of Ukraine or even a passing wink at the darkness of what it means to be a Russian oligarch. I understand Baker might have been afraid of being censored, or rather, his actors facing backlash or sanctioning in their home countries, but I’m not sure that’s an excuse to pare down art. The Russian Timothee Chalamet and the actress playing his mother were great, but I’m not going to pretend that was irreplaceable casting. And I will acknowledge that the mother does make a direct threat to Anora that implies their power—it’s still not enough.
The greatest miss of this movie was the post-Vanya-fleeing stuff at the house. Some of it was funny, but I think the sum of its parts is a good representation of my issues with the film. There’s some screwball component, but it doesn’t quite go far enough. There’s the chaos that tends to come to prominence at some point in Baker movies, but it never comes to a head and it’s never satisfying enough. There was just something so flat about it! It was like the blandness of that big mansion they were in was sucking the life out of the scene too! And yeah, I did dislike the mansion set! It would’ve been okay if they hadn’t spent so much goddamn time in there. During that particular scene, while the dialogue just kept going on and on and hardly anything interesting happened, I was just sitting there wondering if they spent too much of their budget on that location and were trying to get the most out of it. It was just so frustrating.
A lot of people have remarked on the final scene as being something impactful that will sit with them for a while. Needless to say, I didn’t get that. It’s exactly where I thought the film was taking me, and I didn’t think it was a particularly interesting or exciting destination. I liked the Igor character and thought he was multi-functional. His stoicism was funny, and then his puppy dog eyes and kindness toward Ani provided some much-needed tenderness during their night chase. In that car, I think I wanted her to continue to berate him and call him weird and rapey. If the final scene is supposed to be a glance at Ani’s weakness and her broken relationships with men… well. Okay. I got plenty of that in the rest of the movie. I just never saw her as hard, so a display of softness was not especially remarkable to me. I do understand why people liked the ending, and I would say it’s got the most depth the film can offer.
All that to say this much-lauded Palme d’Or-winner was not it for me. I had a good enough time watching it. I love the Armenian guy, I think he’s great and funny in every Baker movie I see him in. I’m not sure I ever want to see him in a normal movie because he’s so good at being exasperated when his life falls apart. I love you Sean Baker’s Armenian Friend, and I’m sorry I don’t know your name.
Yeah, so, back to my general opinion. It was an amusing film. I’ve definitely seen it labeled things like Baker’s most “ambitious” or “bold” or whatever film yet, and it’s just not. The poster with just Ani is gorgeous though, and whoever came up with the idea of the glittery hair tinsel deserves some flowers—not sure if that’s makeup/hair or costuming. I have an affinity for more character-driven movies, and, despite this one’s showy titular woman having a loud mouth and an endangered New York accent, she’s ill-defined. I don’t know where she starts and ends. So it’s a fun ride, but not a satisfying one.
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