Movie Review: Anora

I learned two new words last night

Last night I went to an actual theater to see an actual movie! I know, who’d believe a wild story like that, right?

The movie was Anora, at one of our very few independent movie theaters left in the South Bay: the Aquarius in Palo Alto. I give it four stars.

There are lots of other reviews by now, and I’m deliberately not reading them. This does mean I’ll probably miss some aspects of the movie, but I’d rather not be influenced by the conventional wisdom. In particular, I encourage you to not even look at what Rotten Tomatoes says about it. Rotten Tomatoes is garbage. I plan to read the Roger Ebert site and the New York Times reviews, and that’s it.

Anora tells the story of Ani (short for Anora) who is a “sex worker” in a club where the guys pay for lap dances. She hooks up with Vanya (the diminutive for Ivan) a very dissolute 21-year-old Russian, who’s the son of an extremely rich family. Vanya is staying in an ultra-lux condo in New York to “study.” Conveniently, Ani speaks some Russian, which is why the club owner assigned her to Vanya in the first place.

He begins hiring her for private sex, and at one point they bargain over her price to be his “girlfriend” for a week. He offers $10,000 and she counters with $15,000. She says she would have done it for $10,000 and he says he would have paid $30,000. There’s some wild sex, booze, drugs, and partying with Vanya and his Russian friends.

What’s the point of the extended cash dialog? I think it’s that they genuinely like each other, but in the end it’s still about the money; more so for Vanya than for Ani. He jokingly proposes marriage and things immediately turn serious for her. Vanya says it’s not a joke, and they fly to Las Vegas and do the deed. Now it’s really serious for Vanya’s parents in Russia, and Toros, their henchman in New York, and his two hoodlum helpers, Garnick and Igor. Those three characters really make the movie much more than another Pretty Woman / Cinderella remake. They’re pure comedy gold.

Toros is a Russian Orthodox priest, who swears much more than you’d expect from a priest (in fact, almost every line of dialog in the film is a series of F-bombs). You suspect he’s actually a Russian Mafia member who’s found part-time employment here as a priest, and whose real job is fixer for the family back in Russia. His instructions from the family are clear: undo this thing, because our son is not marrying a whore! Toros takes that job very seriously.

The three invade Vanya and Ani’s house, and some hilarious physical comedy happens, as Vanya runs away and Ani fights with Garnick and Igor. Igor is called a gopnik, another new term of insult I learned yesterday. He is extremely taciturn, but somehow manages to suggest that there’s more there than he’s showing you, which for me is the mark of a good actor.

When I say “fight” I don’t mean yelling. Furniture and noses get broken. Toros gets there and they all set out to find Vanya, which is the heart of the action. I won’t spoil the plot for you, except to say that the parts after the arrival of Vanya’s mother and father in their private jet from Russia are some of the funniest of the movie.

The Whorearchy

This is the main new word I learned. I went to dinner with the Meetup group I saw the movie with, and one of them worked with the ACLU. He had all sorts of words for it, other than “prostitution.” This was an entirely woke group, I think it’s fair to say. They would indignantly insist that the word “prostitute” is “stigmatizing” and “sex worker” is just another career choice.

Some of the movie is about Ani insisting that she’s not a “whore” and she and Vanya actually are married. She’s looking forward to meeting his family (the feeling is not reciprocated, let’s just say). The director, Sean Baker, has made “marginalized people” his main subject, and while Anora is much more than that, Ani’s basic humanity is indeed the main theme of the movie. She has feelings and wants to be accepted; of course she does. Who can object to that? I don’t.

If you read that link, you see another aspect of wokeness: we’re not supposed to use words like “prostitute” or “whore” or “street-walker.” No, those are “stigmatizing.” Now the job is “sex worker” and it’s no different than flipping burgers or answering support calls or maintaining JavaScript. I’m living proof that you can enjoy this movie without buying into all that woke BS, no matter what the director thinks.

Sex is not just another bodily function, and human beings do have deep emotions about it. Pretending that they don’t, and you can just rent out your body to strangers without feeling anything, is the ultimate Cultural Marxism. We could “decriminalize” it and people would still have those feelings of shame. It’s never going to be “just another job.”

With that in mind, go see this movie.