Spoilers below.
Tyler: Norman, as Oscar night draws near, we’ve communed this evening to discuss one more contender in the 2025 races. Anora.
Norman: If you had told me a year ago that one of the Best Picture contenders would be a movie about a stripper who falls in for the son of a Russian oligarch, I don’t think I would have believed you. But here we are in 2025!
Tyler: This one doesn’t waste any time getting to the stripping, either. The proceedings kick off with a selection of ladies giving lap dances. If I was fourteen and somehow talked my way into watching this movie in the name of cinematic research, I’d’ve been hooked from moment one.
Norman: And eventually unhooked I would hope!
Tyler: What even do we have here?
Norman: I couldn’t help wonder if under everything, Anora is a pre-code screwball comedy.
Tyler: That’s a reasonable question. It absolutely aspires to farce.
I attempted to summarize it for a friend, kicking around some wisecracking mathematical equation. (The Girlfriend Experience x Amelie) / (Frasier + Entourage) X Russia.
Norman: I don’t want to go too overboard, but this was unlike anything I’ve ever seen. I was consistently surprised, delighted, and horrified in equal measure.
Tyler: Goodness. I take it you’re a fan.
Norman: Yes! I am a big fan. It took me a few minutes to get into the groove, but once I got there I was in for the ride.
Tyler: The ride is bad! I did not like the ride!
Norman: Oh, it’s certainly uncomfortable. But I really do love it when a movie can catch me off my guard.
Tyler: I really wasn’t having it. Didn’t laugh, sighed a few times. Took dark pleasure in the fleeting subtitled dialogue “This is a never-ending nightmare.”
Like, we have this first act starring an absolutely stunning Mikey Madison as Anora…who allows herself to be sucked into a streak of lifestyle porn with a Russian Timothee Chalamet clone.
Norman: Maybe in this “review,” we can touch on something I see as a difference between how we approach movies…
Or what we respond to in them.
Tyler: Let’s do it!
Norman: In The Brutalist and Anora, you seem to respond at an almost visceral level to movies that are unpleasant, or that put characters through a sort of meat grinder. Feel free to correct me if I’m wrong. But for me, that is not something I mind. I like a good fucked up tragedy! Done well, of course.
Tyler: You forgot A Real Pain! Speaking of visceral displeasure.
In seriousness, I reckon that yours is a fair assessment, though I hesitate to wall myself off from any particular type or genre of film, even if that film is, say, whatever the hell Anora is. I want to be open-minded.
I don’t, though, have any time for work that purports to exploit and abuse women to a fetishistic extreme. It was brutal and abhorrent in Tarantino’s Hateful 8, and it ain’t any funnier here. Anora has a ceaseless stream of bad sex with her drugged-up trick-turned-husband, a useless party-boy layabout who flees a tough scene, leaving her behind with thugs he knows to be thoroughly violent and dangerous. Those thugs then use their strength and bulk to subdue an understandably-livid Anora, including a hammered-home gagging of the character with a scarf, along with knotting her hands with a corded phone. It is all so very, very, very unpleasant.
More to the point, it’s unnecessary. What are we even doing here? It’s not funny!
Look, the acting’s great, the settings are vivid, and there’s a whole lot of technical inspiration and achievement to appreciate. Props to filmmaker Sean Baker for editing his own jam, too. But this is not the empowering fable it purports to be.
Norman: Back to my earlier comparison to a pre-code screwball comedy. It might be better to think of it as simply “screwball” but not so much comedy.
I didn’t think of it as empowering, though, and I’m not completely sure that was the point. I saw it more as humanizing. Yes, lots of bad aforementioned things happen to Anora, but Anora is also no dope. She does manage to survive, she has plenty of agency even if she makes some very bad mistakes along the way. Empowering? No. Empathetic? Yes.
Tyler: Yeah, but Baker pushes it. In explicit dialogue, he makes Anora excuse Igor, lovable thug, for gagging and binding her, and, when he asserts that he would not have raped her, she is startled and seemingly offended (!).
Norman: I think there’s a part of me that loves that kind of ambiguity/complexity/unpredictability. Yes, the relationship between her and Igor is certainly uncomfortable, but I saw it as plausible. If you are Anora and your main connection to men is having them use you as a commodity, meeting Igor, even in those dark scenarios, maybe especially those dark scenarios, might be revelatory.
Tyler: Its conclusion, natural or otherwise, gave me real pause. Is he gripping her face violently? Or so as to kiss her?
Norman: The willingness to leave that uncertainty is a real draw for me. I walked out of the theater actively wondering what kind of relationship that could be. Realistically, there is no future for Igor and Anora, obviously, but allowing for that possibility is fascinating to me.
Tyler: Anora is in a real bind at the end of the film. She’s got some cash, but it ain’t much considering the psychological trauma of her ordeal. She’s also been run out of the club where she did her work before meeting Antic Chalamet Lite.
This movie is as much a modern Steinbeck novel as anything. “Life is bad, and guess what? It’s going to get worse.”
Norman: Or better? Something tells me that Anora could do better than stripping. Maybe it’ll take time to figure out what that better thing is, but she’s capable.
Tyler: Do you think Anora has aspirations to geopolitical commentary? I’m not being a wiseass. Hell, the poster declares the movie “A made in America love story.”
Norman: One would think so. But even if Baker didn’t have those intentions, this movie seems somehow right for the moment, what with Trump actively praising Russian oligarchs yesterday and, you know, DOGE.
Tyler: Well, if we place Anora in our world of cesspools and horrors, she’s really in trouble. She’s not just an unemployed stripper—she’s a woman.
Norman: And probably about to lose Medicaid and/or food stamps.
Tyler: Well, now that we’ve gone and depressed ourselves with a few shards of 2025 living, I’ll ask you whether you’d like to see Anora take home Best Picture on Sunday night.
Norman: I haven’t seen every nominee, but I’d be perfectly fine if Anora, Conclave, or The Substance won.
I’d probably rank those as
Anora
The Substance
Conclave
Haven’t seen Wicked, Emilia Perez, or I’m Still Here.
Tyler: To your earlier point, and perhaps this is a note on which to conclusively establish our differences in approach, The Substance is a movie I haven’t sought out, thanks to people saying things like “It makes you feel weird.” Like, I feel weird most of the time, thanks, I don’t need any help in that department.
This, mind you, from a cinemagoer who’d put Civil War near the top of his 2024.
Norman: I enjoy feeling weird! I guess. Or at least I do when I go to the movies!
Writers' Loom 