Anora
Dec 20, 2024 | 705 words | Movies
The trials and tribulations of a 23-year-old exotic dancer from Coney Island are not the kind of thing that usually prompts me to buy a movie ticket. But the new film Anora is a 2024 Palme d’Or winner that my wife and a close friend of hers decided we should go see, so off we went.
The movie opens in a strip club, and I readily admit to enjoying the sight of nearly-naked women sauntering around as much as the next fellow. It satisfies my prurient interest. And it reminds me of the deep and abiding admiration I have for the wonderful job God did in creating the female form.
But instead of offering us a scene or two with a few provocative close-ups before moving on, the director leans in with an extended sequence of interaction between the attractive dancers and their average-Joe clientele, and between the individual working-girl, just-scraping-by dancers. There doesn’t seem to be anything particularly revelatory in these encounters. After about twenty minutes of this I found myself wondering out loud, “Is there a story here?”
Things only marginally improve once our heroine, Ani, settles on a young Russian with plenty of cash to burn. He is smitten because she is of Russian descent herself and speaks a little of the language. After a few nights as a run-of-the-mill regular customer, he asks Ani if she works “outside,” and she obliges him by starting to make house calls. We get to watch Ani execute her standard strip-tease rituals by daylight, in the young man’s palatial and seemingly abandoned home.
Boredom was getting the better of me and I was on the verge of getting up and leaving, prepared to check out the feature playing in the theater next to ours. Then things took a turn, as this scrawny lad surprises Ani (and us) by asking her to marry him.
The pair continue their free-wheeling debauchery and along with a group of his friends take their non-stop partying to Vegas, where Ani and this goofy kid tie the knot. He is so incredibly immature and she is so worldly in that gritty exotic dancer sort of way, we can’t wait to find out what comes next.
This loppy, 21-year-old is the spoiled son of a wealthy Russin oligarch and once news of the Las Vegas nuptials leak, the oligarch’s state-side henchmen/babysitters are deployed to talk some sense into their wayward young charge, and see to it this quickie marriage is just as quickly annulled.
Ani spends the rest of the movie vigorously rejecting the notion her marriage is not real, and her protestations are simultaneously entertaining, endearing and a bit delusional, since her newly-minted spouse suffers from a bad case of arrested development. Maybe Ani can see this, too, but she can’t quite bring herself to admit it.
The movie is utterly believable, respects its characters, and avoids cliché. For instance, once the henchmen come into the picture things do not take a violent turn, at least not in the conventionally ominous way. Ani is actually the one who perpetrates what little violence there is, and in a comic twist the Russian henchmen/babysitters prove to be her victims.
The film also avoids sentimentality. Towards the end, when Mr. and Mrs. Russian oligarch finally make an appearance, having rushed to the States in their private jet, there is a brief moment when I thought the high-class no-nonsense mother might take a shine to our scrappy little blue-collar exotic dancer, seeing in her a kindred spirit. But the screenwriter had other, far more interesting ideas of how to bring this story home.
The final scene is quiet and unexpected and speaks volumes. I don’t want to ruin it for you by giving my interpretation. But if you want to drop me a line, I will be happy to share my thoughts.
As the screen went dark and the credits rolled to the sound of windshield wipers in the background, the same sound that served as the backdrop to that unique, wordless final scene, I was reminded of my one-line review of Saturday Night Fever from 1977. To paraphrase that review, Anora may start out in the strip club, but it doesn’t end up there.
Robert J. Cavanaugh, Jr.
www.robertjcavanaughjr.com
bobcavjr@gmail.com
