Anora (2024)

An Uncut Gem … and a film that is in part a riposte to the idea that "America doesn't have a class system".

Cinderella didn’t know that prince too long, either.

— Jesse Hassenger (Paste Magazine)

Often the music slips from diegetic to non-diegetic and back again, meaning the music belongs to their world and to ours; we’re coaxed into the story, part of it. There are wardrobe choices, too: Ani, for instance, becomes progressively more clothed as her character gradually becomes more vulnerable.

— Alissa Wilkinson (The New York Times)

[Anora] dislikes her name and insists on going by Ani instead. This makes the film’s title both a gentle rebuke and an affirmation – and this is hardly the first time that Baker has displayed an uncanny knack for loving even those aspects of his characters that they cannot love about themselves.

[…]

In the first half of Anora, we liked Ani a lot. In the second half, we grow to love her unconditionally, like Baker does.

— Jessica Kiang (Sight & Sound, November 2024)

Contemporary cinema might congratulate itself on having a harder-hitting approach to capitalism as compared to the saccharine fantasy of Pretty Woman. But today’s highly successful genre of anti-capitalist movies and television is above all pacifying and reassuring: the capitalists are punished, the rich get their comeuppance, and the downtrodden achieve some measure of revenge. Even when this genre displays real genius [it] still partakes of this impotent morality. Succession, White Lotus, The Menu, Triangle of Sadness, Glass Onion, Parasite, Saltburn, Industry: one can loathe the rich and love them too. [Truffaut] once said that it’s impossible to make an anti-war film. What about an anti-rich film?

[…]

There’s no catharsis in Anora and no catharsis for Ani. Vanya doesn’t stand up to his parents or ever act like a man. “Speak to me like a man,” Ani demands, but he can’t even face her, literally putting on sunglasses when she tries to confront him—not to hide his shame (he has none) but simply to filter out the unpleasant stimulus she’s become. The rich get their way. Ani can’t hire a lawyer and sue for her half, as her family is threatened by momma oligarch. She can only submit to the inevitable, to implacable forces beyond her control. As Toros says in their first encounter, “This is what is going to happen,” and indeed that is what happens: the marriage is annulled and she receives a (relatively) small payout. Ani does get a bit of revenge on the mother in their exchange at the lawyer’s office in Vegas. She humiliates her, saying that her son hates her so much that he would marry a whore just to piss her off. But even this truth-telling doesn’t really hit its target. The father laughs at Ani’s insults because Ani is right—the family is totally emotionally bankrupt, but it ultimately doesn’t matter. There can be no moral victory when there are effectively no morals, no consequences, no responsibility, and no shame.

[…]

There is something profoundly ambiguous and enigmatic in what takes place in Igor’s car, breaking with the preceding film and elevating it to another level. The scene has the ring of truth; but again, what truth? [The] sexual passage à l’acte that follows registers the impossibility of escape from the situation—that is, the impossibility of a satisfying catharsis, of any kind of revenge or comeuppance or change. It’s a desperate failed release where there is no release.

[…]

What we get in Anora is neither a happy ending nor a moral reckoning, but an enigmatic encounter in which the characters can no longer conform to type: the thug cannot simply execute violence and the stripper cannot simply fuck, i.e., use sex to manipulate. It’s a scene of subjective breakdown which registers all the more powerfully the titular character’s ethical dignity.

— Aaron Schuster (e-flux)