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PORTSIDE CULTURE

‘ANORA’ IS MORE THAN A BROOKLYN CINDERELLA STORY  
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Ginia Bellafanate
January 23, 2025
The New York Times
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_ A sex worker in a romantic comedy isn’t new. How the
Oscar-nominated film uses immigrant Brooklyn to subvert the genre?
That’s different. _

“Anora,” starring Mark Eydelshteyn and Mikey Madison., Neon

 

That location is everything turns out to be a truth nearly as relevant
to romantic comedies as it is to real estate. If you cannot recall
where two characters find each other or rekindle something long
dormant, then the rest of the movie probably isn’t worth
remembering.

There is nearly nothing forgettable about Sean Baker’s “Anora,”
which picked up six Oscar nominations on Thursday, among them best
picture and best director, a film virtually unsurpassed in its use of
place and architecture to make the thematic arguments at its core.

The best romantic comedies deliver aggressively on geography, so much
so that to ask where “Four Weddings and a Funeral” or “Love,
Actually” or any Nora Ephron film is set, can seem like wanting to
know which of the ancient empires belonged to Caesar. By now, even if
you have not seen “Anora
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you have likely heard that it is a Brooklyn love story with Brooklyn
drawn well beyond the parameters of bourgeois cliché.

 
We are many, many subway stops away from open shelving and tastefully
patinated kitchen fixtures, away from people falling in love because
they both dig Elizabeth Bishop or Wellfleet in the off-season.

Much of the film unfolds in Mill Basin, far from any bookstore or even
a subway station, in a 14,000-square-foot house that sits on a point
in Jamaica Bay and channels Las Vegas
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Occupied by a 21-year-old gamer named Vanya, the aimless son of a
Russian oligarch, it sits as a monument to the moral failings of the
dubiously rich.

Mr. Eydelshteyn plays a Russian oligarch’s son and the house where
he lives in Brooklyn signals the film’s complicated view of wealth:
Note the water-cooler empties stacked on the porch of a
multimillion-dollar home.Credit...Daniel Arnold for The New York Times

Vanya encounters a stripper named Anora — or Ani — at a club in
Hell’s Kitchen and eventually asks her to see him exclusively, a
transactional arrangement that suits her because she finds herself as
attracted to his endearingly goofy sense of exploration as she is to
his cash.

We are in “Pretty Woman” territory but also in a place where the
accompanying expectations are skillfully subverted. Ani is animated by
a beguiling innocence, just as Julia Roberts’s Beverly Hills sex
worker was, but also carries with her an anger, deeply ingrained, from
which the relationship with Vanya brings only a short reprieve.

Like other Sean Baker films — “The Florida Project,” “Red
Rocket” — “Anora” immerses itself in the indignities
experienced on the less-resourced side of the class divide. For a
while in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the genre of romantic comedy
seemed distinguished by a certain gendered leveling up in the vein of
“Pygmalion” and classic Regency fiction — a sweet and
intuitively smart (if not Wellesley-pedigreed) woman would meet a guy
of much higher social standing, and her fortunes would soar both in
terms of a fulfilling relationship in which she finds herself as well
as the great apartments and country houses that happen to come along
with it.

“Pretty Woman” is the one obvious box-office-shattering example;
two years before came Mike Nichols’s “Working Girl,” in which
Melanie Griffith took the Staten Island Ferry every day to a
secretarial job on Wall Street that left her demeaned by a waspish
female boss and then redeemed by the love of a kindhearted titan and a
shot at showing off her native talent for orchestrating corporate
mergers.

Decades earlier, in the 1940s, a similar dynamic took hold in comedies
like “Ball of Fire” and “The Lady Eve,” when the culture,
getting dragged out of the Great Depression by an aristocratic
president, was eager to appreciate the view that the elites were the
good guys.

Ani, played by Ms. Madison, works in a strip club in Hell’s Kitchen
in Manhattan, but lives in Brighton Beach, near the bottom of
Brooklyn. 

“Anora” calibrates itself to other realities. It shrewdly asks how
much mobility — particularly the kind acquired through marriage —
is really possible in a place like 21st-century New York or anywhere
the wealthy can sequester themselves from the less lucky.

When Ani meets Vanya’s terrible parents right after they land in
town by private jet to break up her relationship with their son, she
naïvely assumes that they will like her if she tries hard enough,
that her polite and mannered way of speaking will make the matter of
her profession irrelevant. It is a peculiar aspect of the
conversations that have come up around the film that “Anora” is
described as a Cinderella story when it is attuned to very different
transitions and awakenings, to princely behaviors coming where you
might not anticipate them.

“Anora” shifts effortlessly between the keys of mournfulness and
farce, exiling the romantic comedy from the place where it has been so
comfortable for so long, the whole universe of tasteful, cosmopolitan
money. In the 1970s, the philosopher Stanley Cavell coined the phrase
“comedies of remarriage” to refer to those Hollywood films of the
1930s and ’40s in which a certain world order is re-established
(usually in Connecticut, he joked) when two like minds reunite after a
divorce or separation (or the realization that the other person,
long-ago shipwrecked and thought to be dead, really isn’t; see “My
Favorite Wife”).

“Anora,” a screwball, might belong to a subgenre as yet unnamed
— the comedy of repatriation, in which it is neither the very
familiar nor the exotic that ultimately compels but the reckoning that
brings you back to some vanished part of yourself.

Ani has witnessed the fantasy — the diamonds on demand, the house
with a garage that can hold 10 cars. She has been to the ball, but she
will leave no glass slipper behind.

_GINIA BELLAFANTE [[link removed]] has
served as a reporter, critic and, since 2011, as the Big City
columnist [[link removed]]. She began her
career at The Times as a fashion critic, and has also been a
television critic. She previously worked at Time magazine. _

* Film
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* Film Review
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* 'Anora'
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* Mickey Madison
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* sex workers(8776)
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* Russian oligarchs
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* Brighton Beach
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* Sean Baker
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