I always watch the Oscars. Going to have to watch Anora. Anyone watch it? Demi Moore winnings Best Actress in all the awards shows until the Oscars. Brutal.
The relevancy of the Oscar’s is in convincing people like my wife to watch movies they otherwise never would. Shortly after Best Picture was announced, we navigated over to Amazon and rented
Anora (2024)
Gotta give the academy credit for handing the top prize to a mad-capped raunchy dark sex comedy of errors.
Reductive assessment, but seems an amalgamation of
Midnight Cowboy and
Pretty Woman … with a shade more violence, nudity, and Russian profanity. First act is essentially an edgier point-for-point reimagining of the latter film; Even steals the “price negotiation” scene wholesale … sans bathtub.
But our main characters aren’t the stoic workohlic businessman in need of love and the hooker with a heart of gold tropes, so it’s easy to predict things are about to go south fast for the Peter Pan nepo-baby and “Brooklyn Hard” exotic dancer.
After the pseudo “happy ending” at about the 40 minute mark, things devolve into a cacophony of strife and hand-wringing, really kicking the
Pretty Woman fairytale in the shins. I caught a vaguely
Triangle of Sadness style humor coming from the pure audacity of chaos surrounding our troupe of characters trying to survive the fallout of someone else’s bad decisions.
The beauty of the film though is in humanizing what might otherwise be stock characters - some Russian goons, a professional fixer, and especially the aforementioned Brooklyn Hard street smart girl down on her luck scrapping for a better life.
And it all culminates in the final few scenes, when we lean into exploring the meaning of Anora’s name, which she had vociferously rejected to that point, along with her past and identity, as a shield to the cruelty of her circumstances.
This leads to the final moments of the film in which we see just how transactional sex and even love have become for Anora, raising the question as to whether she or really anyone could ever authentically connect with and trust another person, or if all relationships and indeed the very concept of love and connection are built on a projection of wish-fulfillment and hope to heal psychological wounds. This forced me to immediately revaluate the entire film I’d just watched and laughed through in a troublingly dark and tragic lens.
In truth, my wife found the film overly long, the humor sophomoric and repetitive, the plotting distractingly chaotic, and the ending weird and off-putting. I agree to a small degree with her points, but overall found the film cleverly enjoyable and after initially thinking the ending strange, abrupt and questionable, now see it as one of the more powerful endings of any film I’ve seen. One of those endings the more you dwell on it, the deeper into the abyss you peer.
Even with all that praise, and believing this to be a worthy Best Picture, I doubt it will go down as a seminal work highlighted by generations to come as a time the Academy “really nailed it.”
Regardless of that, Sean Baker was due this accolade. The man has hit with every movie he’s made, not simply as a writer and director, but also producer AND editor. Most every director is deeply involved in the editing process, but Kurosawa is the only other high level director I can immediately think of who took full credit for editing his own films. Meanwhile,
The Florida Project is one of those perfect movies in vision and execution and
Tangerine was filmed on nothing but a bunch of iPhones.
If Anora winning is a lifetime achievement award for Baker, I’ll take it. Helps that the movie itself is pretty good overall too.
). I hadn't seen it in a long time and there were one or two things that caught me by surprise in this one. There is only one post-credit scene, and it is way at the end of the credits.